JSSE - Journal of Social Science Education

Transcription

Journal of Social Science Education
Journal für sozialwissenschaftliche Studien und ihre Didaktik
Critical Civic & Citizenship Education
Editor: Isabel Menezes, Tatjana Zimenkova
Volume 10, Number 4, © JSSE 4–2011, ISSN 1618–5293
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, p. 2
© JSSE 2011
ISSN 1618–5293
Critical Civic & Citizenship Education
Editors: Isabel Menezes, Tatjana Zimenkova
Isabel Menezes and Tatjana Zimenkova: Editorial ................................................................................................. 3–4
Hugo Monteiro, Pedro Daniel Ferreira: Unpolite Citizenship:
The Non-Place of Conflict in Political Education ............................................................................................... 5–11
Georgi Dimitrov: State-Orchestrated Civic Education versus Civic Competences of School Students:
Some Conceptual Implications from a National Case Study .......................................................................... 12–21
Kenan Çayır: Turkey’s New Citizenship and Democracy Education Course:
Search for Democratic Citizenship in a Difference-Blind Polity? .................................................................... 22–30
Nathalie Muller Mirza: Civic Education and Intercultural Issues in Switzerland:
Psychosocial Dimensions of an Education to “Otherness” ............................................................................. 31–40
Jukka Rantala: The Reflection of a Warlike Historical Culture in the Attitudes of Finnish Youths ................ 41–49
Bettina Lösch: The Political Dimension of Global Education:
Global Governance and Democracy .................................................................................................................50–58
Review:
Brigitte Geissel: Critical Citizens: Risk or Resource for a Democracy? (by Dominik Allenspach) ....................59–60
Country Report:
Oyeleke Oluniyi: Citizenship Education and Curriculum Development in Nigeria ......................................... 61–67
Masthead ................................................................................................................................................................. 68
Keywords: Unpolite citizenship, conflict, education, political, school, civic education; cross-country
comparative studies; education reform, Turkey, citizenship, human rights education, democracy education,
multicultural education, intercultural education, citizenship education, identity, learning, qualitative research,
Historical culture, historical consciousness, warlike heritage, reminiscence narratives, Finnish adolescents,
Global Education, political education, citizenship education, critical education for democracy, globalisation,
global governance, democracy, participation, curriculum, citizenship, civics, social studies.
Supported by the Centre for German- and European Studies (Bielefeld/St. Peterburg) within research area
“Citizenship and Citizenship Education in Europe”
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Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 3–4
© JSSE 2011
ISSN 1618–5293
Isabel Menezes and Tatjana Zimenkova
Editorial
The role of education in promoting civic knowledge,
dispositions and skills has been at the centre of the
educational debate in Europe and beyond since the
late 20th century. As citizens show growing signs of
political disaffection –resulting, to name just a few, in
disengagement, distancing from politics, or choosing
unconventional ways of protesting – and democracies
are said to be experiencing a crisis, education is once
again viewed as a device for reinvigorating politics
and citizenship. But the “crisis” of democracy is not
new and has multiple meanings. To begin with, this
“crisis” is shared both by traditional and emerging
democracies, as political skepticism seems to affect
citizens independently of the historical institution of
democracy; data from the European Social Survey
(ESS), for instance, reveal that levels of political interest and trust in political institutions tend to be low
across European countries. On the other hand, and as
in the late sixties, citizens’ engagement and participation is experiencing “an acute crisis (…) [because] new people want to participate, in relation to
new issues, and in new ways” (Verba 1967, 54) – meaning that while traditional forms of political and civic
engagement and participation seem to be in recession, other contexts and types of civic engagement
and participation are certainly expanding (Barnes,
Kaase 1979; Norris 1999).
How is education dealing with this “crisis”? Is civic
and citizenship education actively confronting these
problems and assuming a critical and political perspective, or are these conflicting topics disregarded?
Are children and young people recognized as political
actors that should have a say (here and now, irrespectively of their age) in current debates or merely
viewed as future “political spectators who vote”, who
are to be prepared for fulfilling their duties after becoming “full” citizens? Does a common, European approach of critical education request an abstraction
from the differences of European democracies and
their different shortcomings? Are there any relevant
differences between “old” and “new” democracies
left at all? And if, how do they affect political thinking and acting, teaching and learning? Do historical
experience and consciousness influence critical education and political discourse in the classroom?
This volume of the Journal of Social Science Education (JSSE), “Critical Civic and Citizenship Education: Is
there Anything Political about it?”, aims at contributing
to this discussion. The authors depart from a reflection
on national experiences in six European countries
(Portugal, Bulgaria, Turkey, Switzerland, Germany, Finland) to consider the tensions between educational rhetoric and actual practices, historical narratives and
citizenship goals, identities and diversity, and globalization opportunities and social exclusion. In all cases, the
lack (and the need) for a critical political perspective is
emphasized, at the risk of turning citizenship education
into a disempowering experience with no actual relationship with “real” daily life in- and out-of-school.
In “Unpolite Citizenship: The Non-Place of Conflict in
Political Education”, Hugo Monteiro and Pedro Ferreira
address the “contradictory realities that value citizenship at the same time undermine politics”, by discussing what they designate as “the non-place of
conflict in school practices and discourses”. Hugo and
Pedro assume that citizenship and political education
in schools risk to be cursed by the school’s “Midas
touch” as “everything that the school touches becomes school-like” – thus implying that school-based
citizenship education is hardly emancipatory and empowering. In line with Derrida and Rancière, the authors claim that conflict and dissensus are at the core
of democracy and that educational practices and policies should be repoliticized.
“How come a generation which had not been exposed to the influence of civic education performed better in civic competences as compared with their
followers a decade later?” is the basic question, intriguing educational researchers and put forward by
Georg Dimitrov’s research in Bulgaria, “StateOrchestrated Civic Education versus Civic Competencies
of School Students: Some Conceptual Implications from a
National Case Study.” Using the data from the most recent IEA study in citizenship education, the ICCS, the
paper questions whether the apparent decline in Bulgarian pupils’ civic knowledge and competencies is related to the teaching of civics and the democratic
ethos of the schools. The author argues that traditional school teaching and organization negatively interferes with the goals of promoting active and critical
citizens –illustrating how the analysis of the impact
of citizenship education should take into account the
larger historical, cultural and political pictures.
In an analysis of citizenship education in Turkey,
“Turkey’s New Citizenship and Democracy Education
Course: Search for Democratic Citizenship in a Difference-Blind Polity?”, Kenan Çayir considers the recent
introduction of a “citizenship and democratic education” course in grade 8 and discusses both its potentials and frailties, underlying that “unless human
rights are addressed in the context of national and international politics and, in terms of the rights and the
responsibilities of the citizen, human rights education courses might improve a country’s image, but
they would not necessarily provide the basis for democratic citizenship” In fact, Kenan argues, in line
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Isabel Menezes and Tatjana Zimenkova
Editorial
with Seyla Benhabib, that not acknowledging the tension between (particularistic) citizenship rights and
(universalistic) human rights can result in a disempowering experience for young citizens, with no relationship to their real life experiences outside the
classroom – a topic especially relevant for citizenship
education practice in migration and multinational societies. The same could be said on the importance of
the recognition of identity(ies) and difference(s) in
the context of a multicultural society such as Turkey –
and surely, this discussion and the claim for “a new
pluralist imaginary” is relevant all across Europe.
Nathalie Muller Mirza discusses the results of a
qualitative research that addresses cultural diversity
in the school, “Civic Education and Intercultural Issues
in Switzerland: Psychosocial Dimensions of an Education
to ‘Otherness’”. By assuming the challenges of intercultural education at school, namely the tension between
promoting autonomous and critical citizenship and
“la forme scolaire”, Nathalie confronts the problems of
assimilationist pedagogical conceptions for immigrans, particularly at it views “difference in terms of
‘deficit’”. But she also highlights the challenges of
more recent European perspectives on intercultural
education in a qualitative study in primary and secondary schools in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. The study considers actual classroom practices,
teacher perspectives and intentions and students opinions, and pinpoints the dificulties of implementing
intercultural education in schools that remain “largely
individual-oriented, monocultural and monolingual”.
The paper by Jukka Rantalla, ”The Reflection of a
Warlike Historical Culture in the Attitudes of Finnish
Youths”, concentrates on the historical experience and
consciousness in Finland, and reflects upon the way it
is disseminated in families, schools and popular media (e.g., videogames). The interesting point of this
paper is that it reminds us how citizenship development occurs in multiple contexts, and narratives
about “national identity” circulate in diverse ways –
as it analyses how a “a warlike historical culture” continues to be the prevalent heritage, especially for
boys. Confronting the persistence of the issue of
“national identity” in the context of an “old” democracy is essential for renewing the reflection on positioning national identities within citizenship
education in all European countries, instead of considering it per se as a phenomenon of developing democracies. The paper raises several questions
regarding the relationship between this glorification
of war and the phenomena of violence in Finland, and
expresses a particular concern with the lack of a critical appraisal of this tradition.
In “The Political Dimension of Global Education: Global Governance and Democracy”, Bettina Lösch discusses the implications of globalisation for a political
education, departing from the analysis of pedagogi-
cal approaches for global education and education for
sustainable development in Germany. Following Nicola Humpert, Bettina emphasizes the tendency for an
“apolitical” global learning, that does not critically
evaluate the global agenda and politics, recognizing
not only the novel participation opportunities, but also “the exclusion mechanism of democracy and politics” that are accentuated by globalisation – and
gives various examples of contemporary tendencies
that menace the quality of democracy and should,
therefore, be acknowledged in political education.
In his detailed review on Brigitte Geissel’s book
“Kritische Bürger. Gefahr oder Ressource für die Demokratie?” (“Critical Citizens: Risk or Resource for a Democracy?”), Dominik Allenspach discusses Geissel’s
attempt “to untangle the two concepts of political
support and political critique” Her conception of
“political attentiveness” seems to be rather promising
also in the context of citizenship and civic education.
Dominik discusses from the point of view of democratic theory the sufficiency of Brigitte Geisel’s argument
of the necessity to introduce the category of
“political attentiveness” in order to explain the state-citizen relation.
Finally, under the rubric of a praxis report in this
JSSE volume we suggest a report on “Citizenship Education and Curriculum Development in Nigeria” by Oyeleke Oluniyi. Oyeleke demonstrates the paths of
development of citizenship Education in Nigeria between historical dependencies, national identities,
multiculturalism and modern societal developments,
while attempting to answer the question, what are
the main specifics, tasks, challenges, declared and de
facto occurring developments, processes and goals
within the citizenship education in Nigeria. Providing
the view on citizenship education specifics in Nigeria,
the praxis report shows similarities of citizenship education developments and challenges in different
world regions and thus offers new platform for reflection on the citizenship education developments.
This collection of papers does live to our expectations of a volume that would critically consider the role and challenges of citizenship education in Europe
(and beyond). We thank the authors, the reviewers,
the editors of the JSSE and the editorial office for
their support during the making of this volume.
References
Norris, Pippa. 1999, ed. Critical Citizens: Global Support for
Democratic Government. Oxford.
Barnes, Samuel H.; Kaase, Max et al. 1979. Political Action:
Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies. Beverly
Hills, California.
Verba, Sidney. 1967. Democratic Participation. In: The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social
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© JSSE 2011
ISSN 1618–5293
Hugo Monteiro, Pedro Daniel Ferreira
Unpolite Citizenship:
The Non-Place of Conflict in Political Education
This paper considers the role of conflict (its constitutive relevance or erasure) in the concepts and practices of
democracy and citizenship. Critically reflecting on contexts of formal and non-formal political education, and
on the observed practices and discourse of relevant educational actors, we intend to interrogate the school’s
conceptions, misconceptions and/or contradictions around democracy and political participation. Focusing on
the arguments surrounding the perspectives oriented towards consensus vs. those embracing dissensus in social and political theories, this article considers the implicit and explicit powers existent or generated in school
relationships, which inevitably affect our ways of looking at citizenship and of educating politically.
Cet article prétend aborder le rôle du conflit (du point de vue de sa pertinence constitutive ou de son effacement) dans des conceptions et des pratiques de la démocratie ou citoyenneté. Sur la base d’une réflexion critique touchant aux concepts d’éducation politique formelle ou non-formelle, ainsi qu’aux pratiques et discours
d’agents centraux de l’action éducationnelle qui ont pu être observés, nous prétendons identifier des concepts,
malentendus et/ou contradictions ayant trait aux concepts de démocratie et de participation politique. En examinant les perspectives visant à atteindre un consensus opposées à l’ampleur des divergences au cœur des
théories politiques et sociales, cet article se focalise sur des pouvoirs implicites ou explicites, présentifiés ou
générés dans des relations scolaires, qui affectent inévitablement notre manière d’envisager la citoyenneté,
ainsi que l’action d’éduquer politiquement.
Keywords
Unpolite citizenship, conflict, education, political,
school
1. Introduction
In the past decades we witnessed several transformations that had profound consequences for the
way in which we recuperated and interrogate concepts such as citizenship and democracy. For
example, the challenges posed by an intensified economic and corporate globalization, by the fluxes of migration and by transnational integration are
dislocating old interrogations into the meaning of
democracy itself (Trend 1996) and therefore recurrently demanding that we rethink and reconsider how
to understand and perform citizenship and the political (Águila 2000).
This paper looks at citizenship education as a work
in progress that articulates the concepts of politics,
political education and democracy involving concrete
educational practices. Also, assuming a critical perspective on education, we see the act of educating in
opposition to that of inculcation or instruction. From
this point of view, to think about education is necessarily to think about education for democracy. Educating citizens capable of respecting and practice
democracy which also means citizens committed to
questioning what democracy is and value its problematic definition (Ruitenberg 2009). Underpinning this
perspective is an understanding of democracy as a
mobile structure which comprehends an ethical-political stance of constant relegitimation and distribution
of power (Rancière 2006). In accordance with a politicizing approach that seems to be lost in translation, ci-
tizenship education is thus brought to the fore and its
forms challenged. Following a path that involves
ethics, anthropology and epistemology, we emphasize the implicit political dimension that cuts across
education and its practices:
1. An ethical path, regarding politics as an ethical
way through personal and social emancipation
which radicalizes the idea of plurality. This reflects
the assumption that democracy is an ethical-political frame which supposes identities to be relational and subjects and others to be “constructed
at the intersection of a multiplicity of subjective
positions (…) which are articulated as a result of
hegemonic practices” (Mouffe 1996, 26). Plurality
and conflict, thus, become a condition and beginning for the political.
2. An anthropological path, perceiving the educability of every person as one of the basic characteristics of human beings. This general
assumption has also an interpersonal and societal
element (Dewey 2002), because educability, in
this sense, refers to the possibility of growing to
society, with society and, in a way, with the right
to conduct society.
3. An epistemological path, calling for the reinvention of knowledge concerning epistemological plurality. We are not referring to epistemological
relativism, but both to a way of assuming diversity
of knowledge and the possibilities of dialogue and
confrontation. Any kind of passivity, on this matter, is a possibility of a quiet and discreet “colonization” (Santos, Meneses 2010).
Following Hannah Arendt, the political is here understood as the underlying question of “being diverse
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Unpolite Citizenship: The Non-Place of Conflict in Political Education
and together” (Arendt 1997, 45), considering that
political (and educational) thought comes from within lived experience, and should be attached to it (Arendt 2006). Nowadays, the experience of schools and
school systems always promotes contact with ways of
seeing and living citizenship that are often contradictory, and neither conceptually sound enough nor
oriented to politicized behaviors reflecting democratic awareness. Reflecting on the contradictory realities that value citizenship at the same time
undermine politics, we aim to conceive the non-place
of conflict in school practices and discourses, underlining the role of conflict at the heart of democracy.
The notion of the political adopted in this paper is implicitly tied to that of democracy, as the notion of citizenship presupposes a participated and critical
involvement in society and, certainly, in school systems. When we aim to discuss notions of Democracy
and the ways they are reflected in practices, we are assuming the need to repoliticize – and of course to rethink – some practices of “citizenship” that are not
clear enough. There are very subtle boundaries between the concepts of the political, democracy and
citizenship, which leads us to assume those concepts
as widely implicated.
Considering what is understood as political education, both implicitly (taking lived educational experiences as a whole) and explicitly (in those more
formal places of decision and representation), it is
useful to pay attention to how it finds particular
translations in schools, in the processes and mechanisms for debate and negotiation, as in the ways
decisions are made. What is questioned here is
whether political education reconfigures (school)
education or if, contrarily, school – or a certain understanding of the territory of schooling – domesticates
the intention and the practices that constitute a
political education.
Starting (if not before) in the course of the Second
Cycle of Basic Education (the 5th and 6th years of
school), in the case of Portuguese schools, young students are involved in electing their representatives, in
electing the student in their class that will occupy the
formal position of Class Delegate [Delegado de Turma], and who by virtue of such “office” can represent
the class in some of the Teacher Meetings for that
Class [Conselhos de Turma]. Students are also encouraged to participate, individually and collectively, “in
the life of the class, the school and the community”
(Decree-Law Nr. 6/01, 18th January). The political intentions are presented in the legal texts and already
reproduced in a variety of official texts and discourses
they are often countered by the instituted pedagogical practices.1 These practices, still anchored in a scholastic2 model, are based on the permanent
“scholarization” of all spheres of life, in such a way
that anything that cannot find its place in the prior
arrangement of school is neglected or put under the
eye of the “discipline.” This “school-centrism” is then
defined as a continuous scholastic categorization done by “those who inhabit the school,” in such a way
that “what escapes this cognitive universe can only
be apprehended under the sign of strangeness or as
epiphenomena” (Correia, Matos 2001, 101). The distribution of people in the school space, from the classroom to its outside, frequently obeys this
school-centric dictate, in the invisible line between
the student in the front row (and note that the organization in rows is in itself revealing) and that the one
at the back of the classroom, as well as in the various
statuses and symbolisms available in the outside spaces of the school.
This is a version of the curse of Midas, here transported to the context of education: everything that
the school touches becomes school-like and it is not
possible to add anything to the school that cannot be
reduced to the school itself. School scholarizes, and in
that it can prize, enrich, reduce or limit. Yet, the curse
of Midas fatally limits the transformations: the school
operates on its subjects as it limits its possibilities of
being itself transformed. The curse of Midas blunts
the school’s emancipatory abilities.
In its most common practices, and due to the effects of the afore-mentioned “curse,” political education in schools submits to a scholastic model. To truly
conceive politics and Democracy, civility and citizenship implies, as we explore further in the paper, to receive (or harbor) that which the school cannot
measure. A political education challenges the school,
the public school in particular, to become permeable
to differences, to heterogeneities, to divergences, as
permeable as the distanced reality of what happens
outside of the school walls.
1
2
2. The Scholarization of Politics or the
Curse of Midas
Empirical evidence offered along this paper comes from a set of
case studies conducted in several Public Basic Education
Schools from the North, the Center and the South of Portugal
on the Non-disciplinary Curricular Areas [Áreas Curriculares
Não-disciplinares] and which include Civic Education. This research, conducted by a large group of researchers which included the first author of this paper, took place between 2006
and 2008 and was supported by the Portuguese Ministry of
Education (Bettencourt et al. 2008).
With the word “scholastic” we mean all forms of “school based”
relations and articulations, either personal, curricular or generally institutional. We assume in this concept the idea that institutions modulate in their own particular way relations and
negotiations, with the tendency to impose its own particular
rules and measures.
6
On the other hand, the school-centric image of the
curse of Midas makes visible a series of translations
apparent in pedagogical practices. To point out some
of them:
1. the conflation between conflict and indiscipline.
If most indiscipline translates into conflict, not all
conflict translates into indiscipline. Indiscipline
numbs by not allowing the contra-position or polemics. In contrast, conflict is the raw material of
democracy, if converted in a politically supported
attitude.
2. the confluence between debating what is happening/has happened and the mechanisms of surveilling self and other. If, in what regards
citizenship, it may be convenient to “reason our
humors” (dislocating Roland Barthes's expression), that should not be mistaken with favoring practices of delation and censorship. At the
level of practices, civic behavior is translated as
the denouncement of uncivic behavior which
brings forth issues of power and principle that
challenge democracy in itself.
3. citizenship converted into politeness, or civics converted into rules of etiquette, results from an artificial neutralization of the word, as if the work of
schools, teaching practices and formal and informal education were not itself political.
Beyond the conceptual issues they raise, these translations have consequences in terms of the pedagogical approaches themselves. The confusion between
civics and etiquette shows rules as untouchable and
unquestionable, as something that subjects have no
possibility of transforming or reconverting. The distinction between civic and civil has consequences for
our understandings of citizenship and democracy, although its subtleties cannot be fully explored in this
paper. If civic often refers to perspectives that are
more clearly political and affirmative, favoring ideas
of common fate, public responsibility and solidarity,
civil is commonly seen as more connected to more
protective perspectives, those more centered with individual rights, liberties and an orderly conduct (Kelly
1995). These tensions also appear (even though combined and transformed) integrated in the differences
between perspectives on democracy mostly concerned with the setting of rules and procedures that
ensure a just management of life in common and an
orderly and civil way to resolve political choices and
those more concerned with the struggle for and the
participation in the definition and redefinition of who
we are, can be and how we can live.
These questions point to problems that go beyond
the field of education. They become dimensions that
convoke current debates on the understandings of democracy and of the political as well as the rich and
complex history of concepts such as citizenship and
civility.
Without school-centrism, but keeping the school
on the horizon, we will now focus on some of these
questions.
3. Society vs. School or the Debate
between Citizenship and Civility
Issues around the term “citizenship” seem to be comparable to the problematization of the concept of
time by Saint Augustine: I know what it is if no one
asks me; I no longer know what it is in the exact moment in which I am asked. This resistance to the
thought plane stretches to related terms such as civility, in particular if one verifies this term. In their use
both terms –citizenship and civility–are often taken
as synonyms even if as ideas or concepts they are not
the same. Nevertherless, it is undeniable that citizenship and civility are related and partly overlap (Kelly
1995). Interrogating the (necessary) distinction and
the (problematic) overlaps between the two terms we
may ask several questions: 1) what is the civic in citizenship?; 2) is there a place for the uncivic and the uncivil in constituting democratic citizenship?; 3) what
approximates civility and politeness? To address
these questions, we can start with the history of a
translation.
If not by other histories, civility and politeness come closer by the classic translation of the Greek
“Polis” by the Latin “Civis.” Civic and civil behavior
pointed to a posture of an adequate relation between
the individual and the State, in particular of how the
legislated individual behaved within the space of appropriateness opened by the legislator State in a desirable and exclusive harmony. In a democracy of a
few, the civic was the civilized, in opposition to the
barbarian who was named as such for not having rules, or State or language. The barbarian owes its name
to the onomatopoeia “bar bar,” presented as the incomprehensible; the gibberish wish has no meaning
(Fialho 2006). This philological exercise is illustrative
of the attitudes towards political education and its
contradictions in practice can be understood. We
could say that in an inclusive manner, political education exceeds the example and becomes the right to
express differences and to negotiate from a diverse
point of view. This is an expression of otherness and
its desired influence in the welcoming society. But on
the other hand, one could easily become attached to
the example following the imposition and the rigidity of the rules that some individuals keep breaking by
its distance from the symbolic language and meaning
of institutions. In schools, this appears when the interviewed teachers kept blaming families and the contexts of origin for the lack of rules and the
misbehaving of students. Pupils become “bar bar” by
not understanding and not being understood; by
being placed on the other side of a fence where the
school is not meant to intervene.
7
This distinction is currently also replicated in the
debate between a “school for all”, a school supposed
to affirm democracy and the Universal Right to Education, and a “school for excellence”, only for some, and
directly influenced by market laws and the ideals of
free competition, in this globalization insinuating one
way everywhere. In schools, both discourse and practices permanently reflect the duality between the
“school for all” and the “school for excellence”, as if
these would exclude and cancel each other out. As Sacristán (2005) tells us, it is as if in the idea of school
there remains the modern presumption of education
as liberation and the pre-modern perspective of education as discipline and selectivity, in a tensional relationship intensified by the violent invasion of
Neo-liberalism.
Beyond the scission between the two, it is important here to call attention to a point of junction, a
blind spot in which the practices associated with education as liberation and the cold assumptions of the
school as distinction converge. All happens as if the
“liberation” largely affirmed in the idea of civility, required the abandonment of each singular social and
political background through the conversion of the
person to the uniform status of the “student.” Assuming the phenomenological presupposition that all
liberation is liberation from something, we find the
other end of the modern liberation ideal – difference.
Liberation is also liberation from difference, from dissimilarity or conflict. Freed from the difference that
singularly defines them as people, and liberated by civility, students are given the definable comfort of the
word “student.” In short, it presents a formulation of
civility against a definition of citizenship.
4. Repoliticizing Citizenship
Regarding the citizenship concept and its circumscribing practices, to underline an education for consensus or a pedagogy of conflict is to assume a
fundamental difference (Ruitenberg 2009). Responding to similar questions around the terrible 9/11
events, philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Jacques
Derrida make evident their basic disagreements,
exemplary disagreements in what they possess in
terms of argumentative richness and of philosophical
separation. While Habermas (2002, 2007) sees conflict
as originating in the failure of communication, in the
broken symmetry that “all speech situations require”
(Borradori 2003, 37), Derrida (2001, 2003) considers
the tension of the heterogeneous to be of utmost importance and places it at the center of what is inherited under the name of democracy –an idea which
is never fully presentable. The dissension between
Derrida and Habermas is irremediable. According to
Habermasian conceptions, “communicative action” as
a route to “mutual understanding” (Habermas 2002,
9) makes the reach of autonomy dependent on a com-
mon will (Habermas 1998). Under systematic and definable conditions, communicative action is directed
towards achieving understanding (Habermas 2002),
in line with a “universalized reciprocity” (Habermas
2007, 197) perspective. We are here in the presence of
an understanding of political action and of democracy that is based on a pacifying consensus. As for
Derrida (2001), on the other hand, to answer for a
democratic inheritance (deconstructing democracy as
a regime of presence and stability, in the name of
what he will call a democracie à venir) demands that
we recognize in democracy an inadequacy towards
itself. Democracy is more a commitment, a promise
than a regime (Derrida 2001). Thus, democracy is the
only system that, by assuming its imperfection,
opens itself to perfectibility (Borradori 2003). Dissensus and “polemos”, and conflict are constitutive
of democracy and its process. The political begins precisely in the moment of an opposition without war
(Derrida 2003), where a “community of citizens is one
in which speech takes the place of blood, and acts of
decision take the place of acts of vengeance” (Pocock
1995, 30), in the open possibilities of questioning,
critique and deconstruction. And that is how, in Derrida’s thought, “there is no deconstruction without
democracy” and “no democracy without deconstruction” (Derrida 2003, 117). While a fuller exploration of this close relation between
deconstruction and democracy, as in the Derridarian
sense of a democratie à venir, goes beyond the focus
of this paper, it is important to emphasize how this affirmation of dissensus over consensus, is useful in
thinking citizenship as unpoliteness.
The conflict as polemos or as a certain unpoliteness
is at the core of democratic processes. Developing,
constructing relationships with others and managing
those relationships, learning and gaining skills at various levels always involve conflict-generated processes. There is no actual learning and development
which is not at least partly conflictual. When political
education is at stake, the role of conflict is stressed by
the fact that disagreement and the consequences of
the processes of disagreeing can become actual skills.
Considering this, interrogating the relationship
between social and educational contexts, we can see
that the meaning of a political education, realized in
an education for democracy, by conjugating citizenship and civility, favors an attempt of institutional totalization which imposes the culture of the institution
over the culture of the individual. This imposition affirmed as a process of socio-cultural fusion (erasing
the cultures of “origin”) is also a process of epistemological colonization. More traditionally scholastic
knowledge prevails and strategically forces itself in
the name of a platform made of consensus, of avoidance of conflict and erasure of other discourses. In
potentially more politicized domains, as would be
8
that of citizenship education practice, this consensus-oriented pacifying strategy is ruled by the attempted inculcation of a school culture, with diversity
contexts being subjected to the monologue plane we
previously conceived as the curse of Midas. Schools
are, of all institutions, those which are more clearly organized in their own closed lexicon (Troger 2002). The
huis-clos of the school tends to create community, but
opposes a democratic day-to-day [quotidian] and its
expression in the actual right to differ. The “polite”
Citizenship depoliticizes in the name of Civility.
Let’s get back to the case studies we previously referred to. The interviews conducted with the teachers
(the whole group of teachers) of a class considered to
be “undisciplined” and “problematic” reveal interesting (and recurring) interpretations of the term
“citizenship.” The teachers responsible for the curricular area of Citizenship Education when they were asked whether the class had class assemblies or if the
class would participate in school assemblies refused,
without a doubt, that those activities could be a possibility for that group. For these teachers, the inherent conflict proneness of that group of students
would make any assembly impossible. As they explained, these students “were not prepared” for it.
This positioned them within an institutional approach to an assembly which tries to exclude or at least
to limit conflict. Also, the pronounced sentence – the
stated lack of preparation or the unreadiness of these
students – points to some possible contradictions:
1. “the students are not prepared”... What teachers
consider to be lack of political competence justifies,
in contradiction, the exemption from an act of
political education. In this manner, the non-existence of something is explained by its prior need.
2. “the students are not prepared”... Being prone to
conflict (and unruled in those conflicts) absolves
them from political action. To avoid a situation of
possible conflict, such as argumentation situations, passes as the solution to the problem.
Political education appears as “docile;” the need to
rule the conflict is presented as the alibi to avoid
conflict and therefore not ruling it.
5. Resignifying Democracy
Used so often, and so often abusively, as a buzzword
or as an embellishment of administrative discourse,
the term “democracy” has been losing its meaning, or
digressing from its meanings. The discretionary use
of expressions such as “education for democracy”
threatens to reduce an actual political and educational matter to an ornamental expression, a reduction with dangerous consequences.
To the extent that “democracy” looses its meaning, citizenship and political education face effective
risks. These risks, painless up to a point, appear when
the neutralized use of the word “democracy” dismis-
ses or contradicts the practices and standpoints related to its significance. Suddenly, in each and every
context supposedly “democratic,” the scholastic dimension of democracy presents a cluster of solid justifications around what is considered “admissible,”
“accepted” and “visible”. Beyond this line, behaviors,
attitudes and knowledge develop far beyond the walls
of “polis” – they are only seen as problematic when
they directly affect its centre. Therefore, questions like cultures, identities or sexualities, just to name some examples, while they do not interfere (in a
disruptive way) with the center of what is institutionally formalized, keep being unformulated or silenced. They stay outside. They stay somewhere. They
are not sayable in a closed polis, subdued to a discreet
surveillance. The invisibility is precisely what gives effectiveness to the whole system.
The French philosopher Jacques Rancière provocatively refers to this non-repressive but invasive force
as a “police order”. It is interesting to acknowledge,
on this matter, Rancière’s (2009) description of
“police order” as a docilization of subjects conducted
by the definition of strict boundaries between visible
and non-visible behaviors or sayable and non-sayable
discourses. The validity of what can be heard contrasts to what is considered “uncivic noise.” This
noise is invalidated as irrelevant, as pointless concerning a consensualized order of the “police order.” The
problems of exclusion or persecution never happen
within this order mainly because, like classical democracy in ancient Athens, everything is presented in its
right place, the issues of position and difference are
resolved. Like Biesta (2011, 144) remarks on this subject: “women, children, slaves and immigrants had a
clear space in the Democracy of Athens as those who
were not allowed to participate in political decision-making. In precisely this respect every police order is all-inclusive.”
The distinction between police and politics imposes itself in this matter. Assuming “politics” and
“democracy” as also having a role in the framing and
management of conflict and right to disagreement
(Rancière 1999; Mouffe 1996), a “political order,” in
opposition to a “police order,” presumes that the established rules can – and in some cases should – be
destabilized. In Rancière's words, politics makes visible “what had no business being seen, and makes
discourse audible where once there was only place for
noise;” clearly, the political is here understood as
work in process, as democracy itself defined as
“whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it”
(Rancière 1999, 29–30).
The rigid establishment of laws and rules, in schools
as in other contexts, of any closed set of just rules and
proper procedures, does not create space for citizenship. On the contrary, this rigidity opposes citizenship.
Citizenship education must open the possibility of
9
speaking and taking stances beyond fixed models of
belonging, beyond crystallized places of positioning
and beyond resolved notions of what can be. This
means that the political presupposes the voice of someone, despite its established role or origin. To sum up
in Rancière’s words: “There is politics in the moment
where we are no matter who” (Rancière 2009, 93).
Analyzing this depoliticization by conceptual impoverishment, Jean-Luc Nancy (2009) assumes the duality of the concept. On the one hand, democracy refers
to procedures of government that have no prior or
transcendent foundation. On the other hand, democracy presupposes the human ability to “develop an integral autonomy” (Nancy 2009, 78). Between one and
the other, what we have is a conception of democracy
that is visibly critical of the ways in which political education is at the same time promoted and surrendered.
Unlike democracy, power is everywhere (Nancy
2009). We need, therefore, to repoliticize (educational)
practices, bringing critical tools and rationality to the
instituted school. Politics is to unjustified forms of power what logos was to myth (Nancy 2009) by stripping illegitimate forms of authority of reason and
justification. Here, the views of Nancy (2009) and Rancière (2006) draw closer together. For Rancière (2006),
the political starts in the separation between government and the principle of kinship, when belonging to
a family, an ethnos or a religion, is not associated to
the legitimation of any form of government. For Nancy (2009), politics (democracy as a political concept) is
the impossibility of foundation or justification from a
transcendent point of view; the political arises from
the absence of a human nature.
Taken together, the refusal of a heteronomous
grounding of democracy and the understanding that
regarding the political processes that place people
and groups, power and rule, there is no outside, immediately places conflict at the center of politics, democracy, citizenship and… education. To construct
inclusive schools and a democratic education is primarily to overcome “police orders,” to open the institutions to the voices of others. The knowledge that
these voices can be disruptive, destabilizing and even
unfair only assures us about the permeability, reflexivity and openness that allow for the experience of democracy, and where people can stand for democracy
as the right to difference and the possibility of change. To face the challenge of citizenship is to regard
the place of conflict as a negotiated way of constructing a political order from educational grounds between adversaries who are not enemies.
6. Conclusion
Exposed to the instability and the fluidity of time,
the contemporary school faces particular challenges.
Admitting that “liquid modernity,” using Bauman’s
(2006) concept, is characterized by uncertainty and
instability in structuring instances such as family, culture, labor and values, (political) education is dealing
with a reconfiguration of responsibilities which is particularly visible in public schools. Like social and cultural elements, schools have special responsibilities
towards diversity. To affirm the richness of this diversity transcendent to the apparent unity of the whole
becomes a particular task in public schools. There the
“right to education” established in the Declaration of
Human Rights becomes a particular challenge in the
response to each singularity that actually composes
universality. This is one of the political/educative
roles of an education that does not deny or avoid conflict but actually underlines its presence as a particular and manageable value.
As we understand it, political education is one of
the important issues faced by contemporary schools,
also because its assumption of conflict helps to insure
a plural and participatory democracy. This implies a
democracy that challenges and interrogates, interferes with borders and repositions and is able to carry
on the counter-hegemonical mechanisms we need in
order to face (and conflict with) the surviving ghosts
of totalitarian powers.
The interrogations and reflections advanced in this
article have implications for school organization and
teaching practices at both policy and practice levels.
A lot more could have been said about the topic how
school finds its order(s) and the educational role conflict can have in the everyday life of schools. Responses to these matters, however, need to be found at
each specific level and context, without faith in magic or general solutions. Finding better practices and
ever disputed solutions is always an urgent second
step.
10
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Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 12–21
© JSSE 2011
ISSN 1618–5293
Georgi Dimitrov
State-Orchestrated Civic Education versus Civic Competences of School
Students: Some Conceptual Implications from a National Case Study
“School has always been a major factor in preparing young people for citizenship and active participation in social life.
This role is especially important in societies undergoing major social transformation, such as the transition from a totalitarian to a democratic system in Bulgaria. The status, goal and scope of civic education cannot be understood without
taking into account the social and historical context within which ideas of democracy and citizenship were developed.”
(Balkansky, Zahariev, Stoyanov, Stoyanova 1999, 90)
Imagine a situation in which civic education has been enforced and practiced for nearly a decade and, as a result, the civic competences of the young people have dramatically decreased as compared with the previous
national level. This situation is not a fictional one. It depicts the findings of a cross-national longitudinal survey. How come a generation which had not been exposed to the influence of civic education performed better
in civic competences as compared with their followers a decade later? Who is to blame? The school teachers –
for not having fulfilled their obligations? The school system – for failing to accomplish its socialization task?
Or the particular civic education program – for being fake or ill-designed? Or may be we, the social scientists,
have been unduly naïve about our expectations of civic education and its implementation in schools?
The more important question is: to what extent does civic education fit in naturally with school life without clashing
with it? Or put in another way, isn’t the classical tradition in the modern school essentially in contradiction with civic
education? This problem takes the particular (Bulgarian) case beyond the boundaries of its national specificity
and situates it at the level of a much more general question of the limits and preconditions of applicability of
civic education, especially in regard to the expectation that it will form active citizens, capable of improving
the democratic self-regulation of modern societies.
The paper argues that the results of civic education should not be assessed in abstract form apart from the
major factors concerning the socio-cultural, institutional and educational context. They are significantly dependent on the character of the national curriculum and the socialization programme specific for each country.
Furthermore, schools, in their turn, are highly dependent on the role of civil society in the respective national
societies, which feature vastly varying political cultures. The large portion of very low education achievements
cannot be adduced to civic education per se, but to the wider alienation of young people from school life.
Keywords:
civic education; cross-country comparative studies;
education reform
1. The Cognitive Puzzle
Usually social scientists and civic education activists
believe that through education we can improve the
civic potential of any single national society and
thus we can strengthen the democratic consolidation, the stability and social fairness of public
life. It seems we only need to enforce civic education
in our schools and then civic competences will inevitably flourish. Measuring the outcome by crossnational surveys could be the only concern we might
have.
If this basic assumption about the transformative
role of civic education is correct we would encounter
a paradox: it would be unthinkable to have a situation
in which civic education is introduced in public
schools as an obligatory component of the curriculum and has been practiced for nearly a decade. And,
as a result, the civic competences of the young people who had gone through the respective education
have … dramatically decreased as compared with the
previous national level.
Yet, life is tricky. The situation described above is
not an imaginary one. It depicts the findings about
Bulgaria in a cross-national longitudinal survey.1 How
come a generation which had not been exposed to the
influence of civic education performed better in civic
competences as compared with their followers a decade later? Who is to blame? The school teachers – for
not having fulfilled their duties? The school system –
for failing to accomplish its socialization task? Or the
particular civic education program – for being fake or
ill-designed? Or may be we, the social scientists have
been unduly naïve about our expectations of civic
education and its e implementation in schools?
Obviously the answers to these questions are not
mutually exclusive and, hence, there is a need for some more careful consideration of the three major concerns – what is civil education; how can it be
successfully implemented; how is it possible to measure its results cross-nationally as if it is universal
(neutral to the country-specific cultural context)? We
might get agreeable answers to these questions by ca1
International Civic and Citizenship Education
(http://iccs.acer.edu.au/uploads/ICCS%20Assessment%20Framework/ICCS%202008%20Full.pdf).
Study.
12
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 12–21
Georgi Dimitrov
State-Orchestrated Civic Education versus Civic Competences of School Students
refully examining the context of the above-mentioned
drastic failure of the national civic education program
(and its supplementing school practices) in search for
any long-range/deep rooted factors determining the
scope and effects of civic education reforms.2
2. The Civilizing Mission of Civic
Education as a Standard of its Quality
Civic activeness is a conditio sine qua non for modern societies, but it is also a condition that is not guaranteed
by the nature of public life. It has to be deliberately cultivated. Hence, the escalating need for civic education,
due both to the fatigue caused by the burden of our contemporary civilization (Mamardashvili 2004) and to the
growing alienation from representative democracy,
alienation that, in Europe, is enhanced by the “democratic deficit” of EU’s political mechanisms (Hix 2008).
Civic education is the policy and everyday practice – in
school and beyond-school – of the formation of civic attitudes, skills, and competencies without which the
self-regulation of complex modern societies would be
ineffective and eventually end in incapacity for socialeconomic development.
This is precisely why particularly high hopes are set
on civic education in the societies where authoritarian or totalitarian political regimes have prevailed
for decades (for instance, Turkey or Portugal and the
post-communist societies, of course). It is the mission
of such education to change the current political culture and behavioral models of general subordination
to the state, towards a new type of self-awareness leading to active participation in the self-governance and development of society. But this is where the main
problem lies: will civic education fulfill its assigned
task of serving as a basic instrument of civilizational
change or, conversely, will the social environment
transform this specific education in its own fashion,
tame it so that it might fit in with the current institutional practices and value models? The answer is not
self-obvious and needs some empirical justification.
In fact, the essence of civic education assumed here is not much different from that generally held in pre2
3
4
5
„it is necessary to go beyond static, universalised and essentialised notions of citizenship and a singular notion of the state, to
embrace a more fluid, de-centred, and experience-based notion
of both citizenship and expertise, but without losing sight of
the historical, political and institutional structures which shape
often highly contrasting forms of engagement.” (Leach and
Scooner 2001, 4).
International Civic and Citizenship Education Study.
(http://iccs.acer.edu.au/uploads/ICCS%20Assessment%20Framework/ICCS%202008%20Full.pdf).
Ibid., 16.
For example, on the eve of implementing civic education in Bulgarian schools a local Expert Panel comprised of representatives
from the Ministry of Education and Science, universities, non-governmental organizations, teachers, school principals, politicians
and school administrators sat to define the meaning of that educational novelty (Balkansky et al. 1999, 94-95). In ranking the
sent-day specialized literature (Delanty 2003; Crick
2000; Heater 1990; Holford and Edirisingha 2000; Jones, Gaventa 2002; Leach, Scoones 2003). Yet, it complies with the standards of the international
comparative study on the performance of school students in civic education, on which the discussion below will be based.3
The definition used is quite comprehensive, taking citizenship and civic education as referring to
knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours of civic activeness. A key feature of this perspective is that the individual student is given a central place; more
importantly, citizenship is interpreted in terms of affiliation with networks of horizontal social communities.4 The specificities of this perspective are highly
significant. On one hand, to be a citizen means to
take an active part in communities, and this entails assuming roles (a stable set of public activities), rights,
responsibilities, and having capacities, i.e., these are
the attributes of a social subject. Communities, in
their turn, are defined by their autonomy and
self-management on a contractual basis. On the other
hand, citizenship involves commitment to supporting social development.
In this definition of citizenship, the state is entirely
missing, even though statehood is a component of the
interpretation of the systems of a modern socio-political
system, of a ‘polity’ – something for which there is not
even a designating word in the Bulgarian language. But a
very notable feature of this interpretation is that
“state” is not meant as an indivisible whole; instead,
the reference is to many and different “state institutions”, specified according to the rank and scope of
their competencies (moreover, they are juxtaposed in
a system of citizenship comporting a multiplicity of
equal in value non-governmental institutions).
None of these key characteristics is relevant to any
post-totalitarian or post-authoritarian society where
the prioritized loyalty to Fatherland is supposed to
equal total, unconditional obedience to the nation
state.5 Nevertheless, all these societies would claim
that they have pertinent civic education.6
6
value and logical emphases of the meanings of civic education,
the Bulgarian experts have placed the State in first place. Given
the history of the country, it is understandable that “civil society”, or the least “community”, do not appear at all as referring
to the horizontal interaction between citizens. What is given high
priority are the national identity and national loyalty… Elections
appear at the lowest rank of importance on the list of objectives
of civic education in Bulgaria, and they only figure as an element
of knowledge about the legal order of the country…
“In the past, within the framework of communist propaganda,
the concept of citizenship was related to the notion of true inhabitants, that is, those who are loyal to the State, have a high
level of patriotism and acknowledge their dependence on the
national state. Nowadays, there is widespread agreement that
citizenship is related not only to the State but also to membership in a civic society and to humankind as a whole.” (Balkansky et al 1999, 91).
13
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 12–21
Georgi Dimitrov
Seeing this, the reader is attuned to realize the basic conflict that is the object of the current study.
“Citizenship” is an idea and practice, whose dimensions are diametrically opposite in a liberal-democratic and in a post-totalitarian society. Therefore, it is
logical, viewed by the standards of a totalitarian interpretation of the term, for democratic practices to
seem incomplete or “deficient” in relation to the ideal
of an individual dissolved in the national mystic and
quasi-organic unity of the state (Karpenko 2007). The
opposite is also true: seen through the prism of liberal democracy, the totalitarian practice of citizenship
and civic education would appear highly “malfunctioning.” In this sense, one and the same achievements
in civic education, measured on the scale of the two
types of citizenship, might show opposite results.
“Bad” results according to one of them could be interpreted as “good” according to the other.
3. National Achievements in an International Comparative Perspective – a
Case Study
Bulgaria is a country which has smoothly gone
through its phase of post-communist transition to become an EU member state in 2007 (together with Romania under the conditionality of a constant
monitoring and verification mechanism). Though it is
the poorest country in terms of GDP or purchase
power per capita, it is a typical South-Eastern European country in terms of institutional arrangements,
public mentalities, cultural patterns, underdevelopment of civil society and active nationalistic
legacies. A process of de-ideologization of education
has begun as early as 1991 and a kind of civil education at all school levels was officially enforced in
2000.
In general, at a glimpse, the data for Bulgaria in
the field of civic education, obtained from the Ministry of Education or institutions related to it, show
that the national results appear to be among the highest in Europe, and, for certain parameters, it has
even surpassed West European countries (Kolarova
2002; Balkansky et al. 1999). But looking more carefully at the data, one would find that they refer to state
activities and to successes in the normative legalization of civic education as a component of the national
curriculum [enacting of a specific law enforcing civic
education and even a mature exam in this subject,
provision of State requirements that guide the textbook writing and the expected outcomes of the teaching process, etc.]. Yet, these are not results
referring to the degree of civic culture assimilated by
school students or civic competences, which are precisely the purpose of civic education.7
In this connection, the latest data, obtained in the
comparative study cited above and published in July
2010, are exceptionally important, as they focus
exactly on the effectiveness of civic education. The
empirical data for Bulgaria, especially viewed against
the backdrop of optimistic government reports,
might seem frankly shocking:
Bulgaria stands in one of the last places in Europe
(only Cyprus is behind it) and, generally, at the bottom of the ranking of all 38 countries. The total result
for Bulgaria is 466 points, whereas the average score
for all countries is 500 points. Bulgaria is in the company of countries like Cyprus, Greece, Guatemala, Luxemburg, and Mexico. But for them the general report
states: “a substantially large share of the students attend schools the directors of which report that civic
education is not part of the school curriculum for the
surveyed target group [of 14-year old eightgraders].”8 But in Bulgaria it is part of the curriculum,
and, judging by the answers of teachers in that survey, civic education is taught intensively as a routine
element of the general education process and extra-class activities.
Bulgaria holds a record for the greatest decline in the
performance of students in the target group when compared against the performance of students of the same
age in 1999.
These findings give sufficient reasons to carefully
scrutinize the details of the empirically registered picture. The data contain telling elements that point to
an explanation of the dismal results of civic education
in Bulgarian schools.
Looking closer at the structure of the distribution
of schoolstudents’ responses, it appears that at the
mid-levels of assimilation of civic education, Bulgarian students do not differ much from those in other
countries: the share of students covering first educational level is 26 percent, as much as the average value in the entire surveyed population for all countries.
At second level the Bulgarian result is 27 percent,
whereas the average value at this level for all countries is 31 percent: here the deviation is still tolerable.
The great problem is that only a small portion of students have assimilated civic education at the third and
highest level: whereas the general average for all countries is 28 percent, for Bulgaria it is only 20 percent.
The main difference is that a significant portion of students remains below the first level: in our country they
are 27 percent, while the average value for the other
countries is 16 percent. The general tendency registered is crystal clear – the higher the level the poorer
the educational outcome….In brief, the Bulgarian
problem is that, on one hand, too few students achie7
8
It is only fair to point out that the further back we look in time,
the more normal it was to emphasize de-communization in
school education and institutional-normative innovations in
civic education. It was still too early then to assess the results
of the reforms.
Initial Findings from the IEA ICCS 2010, 64.
(http://iccs.acer.edu.au/index.php?page=initial-findings).
14
Georgi Dimitrov
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 12–21
ve the high goals of civic education, those manifested
in an active civic standpoint, while on the other hand,
too many students do not attain even the basics from
this education process.
This conclusion raises the question as to whether
the civic education formally conducted fails to achieve its aims or, on the contrary, it does achieve them,
but, those aims are specific to the local conditions
[thus their results, measured on the scale of liberal
democratic culture, seem “unsatisfactory”]? Of
course, the indicated alternative hypotheses are far
from being mutually exclusive, and this is why it is
reasonable to continue the detailed examination of
the empirical data.
First of all, we should specify the contents of the highest level of assimilation of civic education, which proves
to be beyond the capacity of 80 percent of Bulgarian
eighth-graders. Its specific contents include skills of
understanding and analyzing civic issues leading to the
formation of a personal standpoint.9 The high level of
assimilation of civic education involves the capacity for
exceptionally complex intellectual activities, in which a
young person independently builds his/her standpoint of interpretation and evaluation, of explanation
and defense, regarding the problems of civil society
and civic engagement.
Thus, there are in fact two essential problems involved:
1) whether the teaching process consistently envisages
these competencies as goals of civic education?
2) whether in the course of school life, and not only in
the classes devoted to civic education, there are
conditions conducive to alienation of students from
civic issues and from school life in general (which
would answer the question as to the excessively
large share of students who have not attained even
the first level of civic education)?
The problem is whether the intellectual activities in
question are actually practiced in the course of the routine teaching process in schools. This can be judged by
the answers of teachers regarding the four basic elements of their teaching practice: how they teach, how
they evaluate students, how they see the aims of civic
education, and, most importantly, how the performance of students in the classroom stimulates lasting assimilation and practice of the above-mentioned
intellectual skills. The data obtained from the international comparative study are very symptomatic.10
Keeping in mind this picture of the way of teaching, it is hardly surprising that the methods of evaluation also correspond to the traditional school
practices and clash with the values and methodological imperatives of civic education.11
Consequently, it is imperative to ask – how do Bulgarian teachers generally see the value priorities and
aims of civic education per se? The empirical picture
unveils a complete inversion: the traditional educational goal of supplying ready-made knowledge is the
most strongly accentuated one, while the goal specific to civic education – forming civic activeness – is
“Reasoning and analyzing refers to the ways in which students
use civic and citizenship information to reach conclusions that
are broader than the contents of any single concept. Reasoning
extends from the direct application of knowledge and understanding to reach conclusions about familiar concrete situations through to the selection and assimilation of knowledge
and understanding of multiple concepts. These outcomes are
then used to reach conclusions about complex, multifaceted,
unfamiliar, and abstract situations,” 27. (http://iccs.acer.edu.au/
uploads/ICCS%20Assessment%20Framework/
ICCS%202008%20Full.pdf).
10 “Teachers widely rely on the traditional methods and forms of
teaching, such as: direct dialogue between the teacher and the
student through asking and answering questions (39% – very
often, 30% – often) and work with texts from schoolbooks (40%
– very often, 26% – often). Less often used are the forms and
methods of teaching that require active participation of students, such as:
The teacher includes discussion on controversial issues (18% –
very often, 27% – often)
The students research and analyze information from different
sources (14% – very often, 29% – often).
Least often used are those methods and forms of teaching in
which students independently plan, organize and carry out
concrete activities, specifically:
The students work independently on various topics and prepare presentations (5% – very often, 24% – often)
The students work in groups on different topics and prepare
presentations (5% – very often, 19% – often)
The students develop projects that require gathering information outside of school (4% – very often, 15% – often)
The students take part in role-playing games and simulations
(8% – very often, 14% – often).
Without underestimating the importance of each of these
forms and methods of teaching, and of many others, we may
say that precisely the last group refers to the forms and
methods that ought to be applied most widely in civic education. The data show that these are precisely the methods and
forms least used by teachers. One of the probable explanations
for this is that a large part of the teachers do not feel themselves sufficiently trained to use them.” (Petrova 2010, 35-36).
11 “A considerable part of the teachers still prefer to rely on the
traditional forms of evaluation, which consist in oral examination (29% – very often и 30% – often); observing the students
(22% – very often, 19% – often) etc. Comparatively rarely used
forms of evaluation are those that permit active participation
of students and very often provide greater opportunities for independent work, such as: self-evaluation of students (3% – very
often, 12% – often); mutual evaluation of students (2% – very
often, 7% – often) and of projects (2% – very often, 8% –
often).” (Ibid,. 36).
9
15
Georgi Dimitrov
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 12–21
practically absent from the practices of Bulgarian
schools.12
This is also the reason for the focused curiosity
about the data on the degree of openness of the school
environment to students’ free expression of opinion in the
course of the teaching process. It would hardly be surprising for the reader that there are simply no data on
this problem in the report on Bulgaria. But a very indicative fact is that the summary report for the entire
comparative study is extremely vague.13 This is a very
important issue and it needs re-examination below. It
is worth noting that teachers encourage, to the highest degree, their students to express opinions: they
do this in 50 percent of the cases, but inasmuch as
current political problems are generally not discussed
in class – in 60 percent of the cases.
The question here is: to what extent does civic education fit in naturally with school life without conflicting
with it, or is the classical tradition in the modern school
essentially in contradiction with civic education, and
hence obstructive to teaching it in school?
Put in this way, the question takes the Bulgarian
case beyond the boundaries of its national specificity
and situates it at the level of the much more general
question as to the limits and conditions of applicability of civic education, especially as regards the expectation that it will form active citizens, competent
to improve the democratic self-regulation of modern
societies.
The central thesis here argued is that civic education manages to ‘fit in’ only at the cost of a great compromise: it is given room within the system only
insofar as it suits the system by changes in character.
From being a tool for social transformation (or for the
stabilization of democracy), it turns into a channel for
conveying values, principles and practices of the status quo of the national political system and of the
educational system imbedded in it.
In fact the big problem is that this transformation of
values and methodology occurs almost imperceptibly
and, in any case, tacitly. That is precisely why the mechanisms for its occurrence must be investigated care-
fully, especially in the light of the circumstance that
civic education is not something given as self-evident
but involves a struggle between various stakes and
jealous stakeholders (Dimitrov, Boyadjieva 2009).
The entire national education system must change
beforehand with respect to contents, values, and especially procedures and methods, enabling and guaranteeing the development of students as
personalities; only then the novelty of civic education
will be able to enter the mainstream practice. And
this immediately opens the floor for a discussion of
the causes that would explain why it has not been
possible so far, if this noble goal is accessible at all.14
12 “We presented the teachers with a list of possible objectives of
civic education in school, from which they had to choose three
that they felt were the most important. This is how teachers in
Bulgaria ranked the objectives of civic education in school:
61% of the teachers indicated as the most important objective
of this discipline that it must develop knowledge about the
rules and responsibilities applying to citizens.
56% – that is should develop knowledge about the historical
and cultural heritage of the country.
43% – it should promote attention regarding the environment
and its protection.
The smallest percentage of teachers indicated as important objectives of civic education that it should assist the development of effective strategies for fighting racism and xenophobia (4%) and promote active political participation (3%).”(Ibid,.
34).
13 The resulting six-item scale measuring student perceptions of openness in classroom discussions had a satisfactory reliability of 0.76 for
the international ICCS database with equally weighted national
samples. Figure 6 in Appendix D presents an item-by-score map for
students’ perceptions of openness in classroom discussions. It shows
that, on average across countries, students reported that most of
these events occurred at least “sometimes”. The percentages of students who “often” observed these events ranged from 52 (“encouraged to express opinions”) to 11 percent (“students bringing up current events in class”). Initial Findings from the IEA ICCS 2010,
72–73., (http://iccs.acer.edu.au/index.php?page=initial-findings).
14 The answers to these questions will also lead, as a by-product, to
an understanding of the essential local fact of some international relevance: Bulgarian teachers in their vast numbers say
they are not sufficiently prepared and do not have appropriate
resources to teach civic education, even though the latter is set
as an educational requirement by the state (Petrova 2010, 36-37).
4. But Why So? – In Search for Explanatory
Factors
Stated most generally, in a country that is parting
with its totalitarian past with difficulty and in an inconsistent manner [registered by many local surveys
and studies], its many hot social issues and the series
of crises it has undergone seem to naturally marginalize the educational reform [making it a task for which
the time is not yet ripe, even though changes have
been made unceasingly in the educational system
over the last 20 years]. In such a country there is no
political agent that looks upon the educational reform as a real policy priority, even though it is not
rare for political parties to pay lip service to the importance of education. However, practice has shown
that when they come to power, these parties do not
fulfill their declared intentions. Even more importantly, civic education is not emphasized in any of the
party programmes. As it has often been noted recently, the big problem for effective introduction of
the kind of civic education that will form active and
responsible citizens does not lie in the open resistance it encounters, but in the lack of influential
stakeholders interested in its realization…
That is precisely why, for example, the Bulgarian
ministry of education tends to introduce civic education mostly under external pressure rather than because it holds it as an element of its strategy for
16
Georgi Dimitrov
educational reform. External pressure is primarily coming from abroad in connection with long-term programmes of influential international organizations –
UN, Council of Europe, the World Bank, etc., and in second place – from local NGOs who benefit from donations from foreign or international institutions
(Dimitrov, Boyadjieva 2009). The lack of enduring public and political interest in the success of the educational reform leads to a situation where, even when
such a reform is started under external pressure (in
the Bulgarian case, under pressure coming from the
World Bank), the end result is a devastating failure of
the reform.15
Under these preconditions it is simply inevitable
that the concrete project for civic education will mostly
reflect the underdevelopment of the national civil society
rather than be a long-term resource for the sustainable construction and development of that society.
An exceptionally important point is that this underdevelopment of civil society is evident at a number of levels and under different forms. Its most important
aspect, of course, is the lack of a governance policy
that would express the social consensus for minimizing the role of the state in public life, all-powerful
and without alternative. From this point onwards,
educational innovations will inevitably be a result –
varying and depending on the circumstances – of the
total, integrated impact of a number of factors:
1. In such a society there is no tradition for ministries to develop their policies through dialogue
with the addressees of the public policies. The
ministry of education makes no exception. The
most important result of the lack of good governance is the national school curriculum which
is devised by certain anonymous persons in an
utterly non-transparent way. The projects of this
curriculum and changes made in it have never
been a topic of public debate between education
experts and public stake-holders. The staff of the
Council for Curriculum Planning is selected by
the minister alone, and the arbitrary way in
which this institution is constructed precludes,
as a rule, the possibility that it will bear responsibility before the public.
2. In these circumstances it is perfectly normal that
the contents – and even more the structure – of
the national curriculum proves to be a compromise at the given moment between the corporatist
interests of stake-holding professional categories/
guilds that enter into very complicated schemes and
internal opposition (Dimitrov, Stoykova 2009). In
particular, the question of the status of civic education in Bulgaria turns out to be resolved by:
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 12–21
2.1 the opposed ambitions of different teachers’
guilds (backed by their textbook publishers) of
geography, history, literature, philosophy who
succeeded to dissolve civic education as contents
of their traditional subjects;
2.2 the lack of interest of the teachers’ professional
community (pedagogical experts), which meanwhile has a strong position in the universities
training future teachers (this disinterest is basically due to the small chances they have of obtaining a monopoly influence over the new
discipline of civic education); and
2.3 the inertness of the sociological and politological communities as guilds: they do not identify
any strategic interest of their own in the
strengthening of civil society, nor, respectively,
their professional stake in the development of
civic education.
3. It might seem, at first glance, that the lack of a
premeditated state policy for civic education is a
favorable precondition for NGOs playing a decisive role in the formation of a general conception
regarding this education and for the practical
steps to be taken in introducing it in school. This
is true to some degree, as evidenced by the
examples of countries like Bulgaria, Romania,
and Croatia (Dimitrov, Boyadjieva 2009). But the
problem here is that:
3.1 On one hand, the room for influence of NGOs is
strongly dependent on the characteristics of the
concrete state: for instance, in Croatia, where
there is a tradition going back decades, of decentralization and local self-government, the achievements of a good number of NGOs are
particularly significant, unlike countries like Bulgaria and Romania, where the achievements are
both more modest and less enduring.
3.2 On the other hand, it is even more important
that the specific nature of NGOs is strongly influenced by the type of state in which they exist.
As the research results indicate, the weakness of
civil society in Bulgaria is evident likewise in the
fact that the non-governmental sector, instead of
expressing consolidated public interests as a corrective for government policies, works mostly as
a supplier of professional expertise for the governmental institutions (Toneva 2011). In such an
environment it is not hard to imagine that NGO
experts are, mildly speaking, serviceable towards
the already established stakes of the state (more
precisely, towards the interests of coteries speaking for the state). Hence, it is no wonder that precisely the NGO representatives actively cooperate
15 The grounds and details of argumentation supporting this thesis are presented in the collection “The State Against the Reforms” (Dimitrov 2004).
17
Georgi Dimitrov
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 12–21
for the realization of civic education in the framework of ‘inter-subject links’ and in the form of an
abstract-theoretical introduction to the idea of
“civil society” only.
3.3 This, however, does not invalidate the actual
truth in the NGO representatives’ assertion that
the underdevelopment of the nation’s civil society is a serious obstacle for society to become a
reference source, a framework, and a partner in
the actual teaching process.
4. The trouble described so far has a continuation.
Given that civic education is dispersed in the interdisciplinary connections between traditional
school subjects, a very strong possibility appears
that its objectives will be substituted: instead of
the spirit of civic education reforming the school
environment, it is the long tradition of “classical
school disciplines” (“the narrative subjects”) that
practically stifle the innovativeness of civic education. When inserted into the textual body of
subjects like history, geography, Bulgarian language and literature, civic education has fallen
victim to the biased nationalist-patriotic discourse,16 instead of forming a civic discourse.
Thus it falls prey to the traditional narrative stylistics and the old uncritical mentality of these
subjects. By dissolving civic education into the
traditional disciplines, the possibility emerges
for the “long arm” of cultural pattern (i.e. of the
state that has taken the place of the missing citizenship) to model and crush civil issues, including civil meanings, values, principles, and
problems. In a most convenient and smooth
way, memorizing substitutes critical thinking as
if by the logic of the subject-matter itself.
5. But the situation is considerably more complicated. The importance of the state as a basic
agent of modernization in all national societies
where modernization began at a considerably later
period in history should be strongly emphasized.
5.1 On one hand, a necessarily privileged value is attributed to the state as a center of the picture of
a world depicted as a ‘natural order of things’ by
school education, and, hence, including a supreme place for Nature in the notion of the Fatherland, and giving primacy to a past that
artificially glorifies the state, etc. Hence, the
natural order of things and the historical past
seem to justify the lack of personal opinion and of
taking a stance among students.
5.2 On the other hand, this does not mean that one
may remain blind to the intrusive supremacy of the
state at present, i.e. to the refusal of totalitarian
power to shrink to dimensions that would be
more productive and more efficient for social development.
5.3 But, in a third aspect, it is essential to consider
what specific kind of national state we are talking
about. There can be no doubt that the French
national society is characterized by a strong
tradition of statism, and, hence, statism marks, to
a great degree, the contemporary social life in
France, in sharp contrast with the countries of
the Anglo-Saxon world. The specific German reverence for statehood is also well known, but with
one very important difference: the long tradition
there of decentralized state authority. It is not
without importance what kind of state is referred
to in school education. For instance, it is well
known that, even today, the Bulgarian state is
super-centralized; in fact, it is the most centralized in EU.17 Moreover, unlike some other
post-communist countries, it is marked by a notable lack of publicity in the principles of legal institutional order (Dimitrova-Kovacheva 2010). It
should also be pointed out that a “softened
state” in a post-communist society refers to a
state that has fallen victim to corporativist interests and, hence, is weak and ineffective in implementing its policies (Hausner 2006). It is
precisely this particular kind of state that is being
legitimized by the picture of the world drawn by
civic education, emphasizing the grandeur of the
past and the country’s natural beauties, and excluding the critical examination of the role of the
state in contemporary public life.18 A question entirely excluded is the right of the citizen to resist an
unjust and ineffective state government.
6. Last but not least, it is understandable that the
role of the teacher will be particularly significant
where there is a lack of active state policy for developing civic education, and where NGOs show
considerable servility towards the state. Seemingly, a teacher who really wanted to introduce
an authentic civic education would not meet
with particularly active resistance. But the question is: where may the average teacher draw the
motivation and the resources for adequate civic
education? In this connection a long series of
decisive factors should be recalled:
16 It is quite easy to identify the persistence of a century long
strong nationalistic discourse in school teaching of history and
geography (Hranova 2011) or in the local tradition of the very
historical knowledge itself (Daskalov 2002; Mishkova et al.
2006).
17 Cf the AER research report “From Subsidiary to success: The impact of decentralisation on economic growth.” (http://www.
aer.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/PressComm/Publications/
AER_Study_on_decentralisation/Studies/GB-FINAL+cover.pdf).
18 It must also be remembered that this is a state which, even
though not the owner of the “means of production” any more,
is still a key redistributor of the public wealth and a major consumer/assigner of public activities and services. Private business proves to be, to a great degree, dependent on the state
even today – more than 20 years after the fall of communism.
18
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 12–21
Georgi Dimitrov
6.1 the schoolbooks with which a teacher has to
work are generally useless, since they embody
the statist State Requirements and, hence, the results quoted in the national report for the international comparative study are completely
logical – Bulgarian teachers, as a rule, avoid
using these schoolbooks (Petrova 2010, 35).
6.2 one should not forget that the authentic values
and principles of civic education clash with the socialization programme of the other (old) school subjects that these teachers basically teach. The
problem is, how these two different socialization
projects can “unconflictingly” come in conjunction in the work of one and the same teacher,
especially if the expected result of civic education is the formation of young people with the
capacity for critical thinking and for being active
citizens. [And this is far from being only a Bulgarian problem: remember the authors of the summary report for the international comparative
study preferred to be vague about the degree of
actual freedom in the classroom activity …]
6.3 this would not in itself be an obstacle for a teacher who was exceptionally motivated and unsparingly devoted to the cause of civic education. But
specifically in the Bulgarian case [yet not so different from the Romanian or Ukrainian ones, for
example], the crisis of the school system, which
has been going on for decades now, has systematically kept in schools mostly the teachers who
have difficulties making ends meet. So the fight
for authentic civic education is simply beyond
their reach.
School life itself is in a systematic crisis and repulses students and teachers alike, hence it is conducted in a purely formal way. The drastic
deterioration of the performance of Bulgarian
schoolstudents, as established recently by the consecutive TIMSS and PISA studies, indicates the incapacity of present-day schools to achieve their basic
goal – to educate.
To sum up, seen through the prism of the circumstances discussed above, students’ results in civic
competence registered by the international comparative study are actually not that bad. They can be assessed even as surprisingly good. The large portion of
very low education achievements cannot be adduced to
civic education per se, but to the wider alienation of
young people from school life, something for which civic
education, as practiced in the described manner, could
not possibly compensate.
5. Conclusion
The main thesis is that the results of civic education
taught in schools should not be assessed abstractly
omitting the major factors concerning the sociocultural, institutional and educational context. They
are significantly dependent on the character of the
national curriculum and the socialization programme
specific for each country and embodied in the schoolbooks. But in addition to this, the results of poor civil
competences are also explained by the practices of
school life: schools today in general prove to be predominantly conservative. They do not create an open
classroom environment conducive to the practices of
active citizenship. Furthermore, schools are too dependent, alas, on the role of civil society in the respective national societies with their vastly varying
democratic political cultures.
Hence, an effective reform of civic education that
would stabilize and encourage civic activeness and
lead to social development, cannot be carried out apart
from the reform of the education system and the democratization of public policies. Authentic civic education as
an education in democratic citizenship is a main path
to the humanization of the educational system; it should
thereby serve as a solution to the long structural and
value crisis of that system. Moreover, the likelihood of
substantial progress in civic education would only
grow if it is perceived not as an aim in itself but as a
tool for educational and social reform; in that case, civic
education would become a real political priority.
19
Georgi Dimitrov
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 12–21
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Education, Vol. 10, No. 1, 33–43.
(http://www.jsse.
org/2011/2011-1/pdf/Hranova-JSSE-1-2011.pdf).
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a Review. In: IDS Development Bibliography 19.
(http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/bookshop/db/db19.pdf).
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Education in Southwestern, Southeastern and Eastern Europe.
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Southwestern, Southeastern and Eastern Europe. (unpublished).
Van Gerven, Walter. 2005. The European Union – A Polity of
States and Peoples. California.
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Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 22–30
© JSSE 2011
ISSN 1618–5293
Kenan Çayır
Turkey’s New Citizenship and Democracy Education Course: Search for
Democratic Citizenship in a Difference-Blind Polity?
The paper introduces and critically evaluates the new Citizenship and Democracy Education course in the Turkish curriculum. This course has been introduced as a mandatory subject in grade 8 per one hour a week in the
2011-2012 academic year. Following the comprehensive 2005 curriculum reform, Citizenship and Human Rights
Education courses had been abolished and these themes had been distributed to the curriculum of different
courses. However, recommendations of academics and international bodies such as the Council of Europe on
the advantages of having a distinct course on citizenship and human rights have led the Ministry of National
Education to reintroduce a compulsory course covering these themes. The new course seems to be a human
rights education course with its emphasis on rights and responsibilities. It could be considered a progressive
step in this regard. However, the implication that educating people about their rights could be a basis of democratic citizenship might not be realized in present Turkey where internal conflicts based on religious, ethnic
and language-based differences are becoming salient. The paper argues that democratization of citizenship in
Turkey requires not only an education about rights but also the questioning of the current difference-blind
civic republican notion of citizenship. It draws attention to the necessity of the development of a new political
framework and a related citizenship course that would allow for peaceful coexistence of cultural differences.
Keywords:
Turkey, citizenship, human rights education, democracy education, multicultural education
1. Introduction
Citizenship and human rights are becoming explicit
themes in formal education in many countries. They
have been made an integral part of the curriculum of
several countries ranging from Europe to Eastern Europe and Latin America in an effort to counter the increasing disinterest in politics and to promote the
culture of democracy and human rights (Osler, Starkey 2005; Tibbitts 1994). Turkey became a part of this
international development during the mid-1990s: it
formed its National Committee on the Decade for
Human Rights Education in 1998 in response to the
appeal by the United Nations for the implementation
of human rights education at the national level.
Alongside several other reforms intended to bring
Turkey’s legal and educational structure in conformity with international standards, human rights
themes were incorporated into citizenship education.
In 1998, a course hitherto called Civics was renamed
as Citizenship and Human Rights Education and
started to be taught in grades 7 and 8 for one hour a
week (Çayır, Gürkaynak 2008).
Civics has traditionally been at the very center of
national education in Turkey, mainly serving the purpose of creating a nation of unity (Üstel 2005). In all
textbooks, Turkish citizenship was defined as a membership in the State on the basis of a single religion
(State-monitored version of a Sunni Islam) and a single language (Turkish). Textbooks promoted an organic vision of society and duty-based citizenship along
with a denial of the recognition of ethnic, religious
and language-based minorities. The incorporation of
human rights into citizenship education, in this re-
gard, was an important step in transforming the dominant notion of citizenship in Turkey towards a
more pluralistic and inclusive form. In other words,
these Citizenship and Human Rights Education courses could have served to expand citizenship to include cultural rights, identity rights and human rights.
However, as research on the textbooks of these courses demonstrated, their eclectic content blended
human rights themes with a nationalistic and militaristic perspective. Some chapters involved extensive
references to human rights such as “the development
of the notion of human rights,” “basic rights and freedoms” or “the protection of human rights at national
and international level.” Other chapters of the same
book mentioned “our internal and external enemies”
and promoted a militaristic conception of citizenship
(Çayır, Gürkaynak 2008). These Citizenship and Human Rights Education courses also suffered from
other shortcomings including lack of teacher training,
and teaching the course being taught for only one
hour per week.
These courses have been abolished as a result of
the 2005 curriculum reform. This reform is one the
most comprehensive reforms in the Turkish education
history that aimed to redesign the whole curriculum
on the basis of constructivism and student-centered
learning. New programmes have been developed at
all grades, and new textbooks (and, for the first time,
teacher’s guides and students’ workbooks) have been
introduced in primary and secondary levels. As part
of this reform, the Ministry of National Education
(MoNE) decided to teach citizenship and human
rights not as a distinct subject but distribute these
themes over the curriculum of other courses in different grades.
Recently, however, the MoNE has announced the
reintroduction of a distinct Citizenship education
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Kenan Çayır
Turkey’s New Citizenship and Democracy Education Course
course as part of a new project. This project, titled
“Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education” (DC/HRE), has been launched in 2009 to be conducted in collaboration with the Council of Europe.
This 3-year project aims at revising educational regulations and developing new materials for DC/HRE
principles. The project also involved development of
a new, distinct course covering citizenship and human rights themes. The programme of the new course,
named “Citizenship and Democracy Education,” has
been developed and piloted during the 2010-2011 academic year. A new textbook (Özpolat 2011), student’s
workbook and teacher’s guide have been developed
to be taught as mandatory in grade 8 (13-14 years old
pupils) in the 2011-2012 academic year.
This paper critically evaluates the program and
textbook of this course by mainly problematizing its
difference-blind content in the context of Turkey’s
contemporary political and social scene. I analyze the
textbook with a qualitative methodology, specifically
with a discourse analysis to identify the content,
groups, information underlined or omitted by the author(s) (Pingel 1999). I deconstruct the textbook,
first, to problematize the relationship between human
rights and citizenship education. The new Citizenship
and Democracy Education course assumes that educating students in human rights will lead to the development of democratic citizenship. I argue that this
might not be realized unless students are made to acquire skills that enable them to critically reflect upon
the current social, cultural and political problems of
Turkey. Thus, second, I explore the notion of civic culture that the textbook promotes. I then relate this
discussion to problems concerning citizenship which
are becoming much more salient in contemporary
Turkey with increasing voices of non-Turkish and
non-Muslim minorities about formal and informal barriers in front of their full citizenship. I argue that the
new course, mainly due to the present legal structure
and dominant nationalist political culture, is still based on a single social imaginary, which does not allow for the representation of different identities and
interests. However, this course provides us with a
ground to discuss several crucial points such as the
need to develop a new notion of citizenship in order
to equally include differences and the need to revise
the link between citizens and the nation-state. This is
crucial in Turkey given its lively debate about the forming of a new civil constitution after the general elections of June 2011, a constitution that could lay the
foundations for the denationalization and the democratization of the citizenship regime.
2. The content of the Citizenship and
Democracy Education Course
The rationale behind introducing a distinct subject
covering citizenship and human rights is presented
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 22–30
by the MoNE as follows: The age we are living in, as
the MoNE states, is “the age of human rights” (MEB
2010). The MoNE takes this to mean that “adopting,
protecting, and enjoying human rights have been a
necessity for people. Human rights have been an important measure of a country’s level of development”
(MEB 2010). Therefore, raising citizens who respect
and protect human rights requires the inclusion of
human rights in the educational processes. This
course is the result of an attempt to revise and renew
the educational programmes in order to raise “conscious citizens who make sense of the changing
world” (MEB 2010).
Another reason for introducing a distinct course,
according to the MoNE, was the criticisms it has taken
from teachers, principals and several NGOs for making citizenship and human rights themes cross-curricular after the 2005 curricular reform and on the
importance of having a separate mandatory course on
citizenship. Title of the former course in pre-2005 period was Citizenship and Human Rights Education.
The MoNE, this time, named the course as ‘Citizenship and Democracy Education’ by underlining the importance of “democratic citizenship” and pointing
out that “democracy education includes human
rights education” (MEB 2010).
In Turkey’s highly centralized education system,
the Board of Education prepares the curricula for all
subjects and its approval is required for the adoption
of a textbook in formal education. The MoNE itself develops a textbook for all subjects and allows private
publishing houses to prepare textbooks to be used
after the Board of Education’s approval. For the Citizenship and Democracy Education course, there is yet
one textbook published by the MoNE (Özpolat 2011).
The content of the course is composed of four
main chapters. Their titles are as follows:
I. Every human being is valuable
II. The culture of democracy
III. Our rights and freedoms
IV. Our duties and responsibilities
Under each title there are subtitles with one-page
readings about specific themes. The first chapter involves themes underlining the importance of concepts such as “human dignity,” “humanitarian
values” in relation to human rights agreements. The
second chapter presents a “definition of democracy,”
“characteristics of a democratic citizen” and the importance of “tolerating different views” in a democratic society.” The third chapter focuses on human
rights along with subtitles on “the universality of
human rights,” “non-governmental organizations”
and “democratic solutions to problems.” The last
chapter informs students about responsibilities.
These involve citizenship responsibilities of paying
taxes, voting, and performing duties to protect
“national unity and indivisibility.”
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Kenan Çayır
3. Evaluation: Can Human Rights Education
Be a Basis for Democratic Citizenship?
Citizenship and Democracy Education course has
some progressive elements as well as some major
shortcomings. Compared to the former Citizenship
and Human Rights Education course of the 8th grade,
one positive step is the removal of chapters such as
“the elements of national security and national
power” which handled internal and external politics
with a militaristic perspective and language. Another
progressive element is the inclusion of several new
objectives such as “acquiring skills to identify discrimination and not to discriminate against anyone,”
“developing skills to take responsibility for gender
equality” or “developing awareness on the importance of dialogue and communication for living together” (MEB 2010).
The textbook starts with a liberal abstract notion
of the dignity of the human and continues with several references to the concept of human rights and international human rights agreements. There are, on
the other hand, very few references to the concept of
citizenship. Of 32 learning objectives, only three specifically mention the concept of citizenship. Therefore, although the course has been named Citizenship
and Democracy Education, it seems to provide basic
human rights education rather than a ‘classical’ citizenship education. To put it differently, the new
course makes very few references to the political institutions, constitutional principles and country specific
norms and regulations of Turkey. Rather, it aims at
strengthening skills for human rights. In this sense,
the new programme reflects the approach of the
Council of Europe which, as Audrey Osler notes, does
not distinguish between education for democratic citizenship and human rights education. These two
fields, according to the Council of Europe cover the same core ground and aim at strengthening democracy
and human rights (2009, 61). Similarly the programme of Citizenship and Democracy Education is
based on an assumption that many concepts around
human rights inherently relate to citizenship and that
human rights education can be a basis of democratic
citizenship.
It is true that the concept of citizenship in a democratic polity requires understanding and acceptance
of human rights which provide the framework for
equal participation of all citizens in public life (Osler,
Starkey 2000). One could also argue that citizenship
education, when taught on the grounds of human
rights can prepare students to be active participants
in the civil and political life of their local, national
and international community. This line of thought requires us to formulate and explore the question, “can
the emphasis put on human rights themes in the new
course provide a basis for the notion of democratic citizenship in Turkey?” My response would be both
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 22–30
“yes” and “no” depending on the way human rights
themes are related to problems about citizenship in
textbooks and classrooms.
I would argue that studying human rights does
not necessarily provide a framework for the development of skills regarding democratic citizenship. I
draw my argument on a recent study in which a colleague and I interviewed 7th and 8th grade students
(13 and 14 years old) taking the former Citizenship
and Human Rights Education course, to understand
their views on the course and their perceptions of
human rights (Çayır, Bağlı 2011). As mentioned above, these courses were mandatory before 2005 and
involved, as their title says, many topics related to
human rights. Particularly the 7th grade curriculum included several progressive elements regarding human
rights education. Nevertheless, for the students, the
courses were “boring, unnecessary, unimportant and
easy.” One reason for this, according to the students,
was textbooks, which did not touch upon “real problems.” Another factor was inappropriate teaching
methods. Despite the negative attitudes of the students, the findings show that they acquired some
human rights knowledge, particularly those directly
attracting their interests (such as “nobody can enter
into my house without permission.”) However, the
knowledge of human rights they acquired in school
did not empower them in their daily lives. They repeatedly noted that “the real life was outside [not in
textbooks].” And what they saw in real life, mainly
through the media, was a world where nobody
“respects human rights.” Students were well aware of
internal problems such as the Kurdish issue (“Eastern
issue” in their language) and international problems
like “the invasion of Iraq by the United States.” The
study demonstrated that “being educated” on human
rights did not make them feel empowered. Rather
what the children told us was that they felt weak, powerless and vulnerable: “Many people around us are
not observing human rights. Since there are such people, our compliance with [human rights] might cause
us to be oppressed” (Çayır, Bağlı 2011, 11). Knowing
their rights, in this context, was important in so far as
that helped them “not to be crushed” (ibid., 11) rather than helping them to develop democratic citizenship skills.
This experience should be reexamined while reviewing the programme of the new Citizenship and Democracy Education course, the core of which is, once
again, constituted by human rights topics. The main
problem of the former programme was that human
rights were handled in a very “sterile” way in both
textbooks and classrooms. This means that human
rights were taught without recognizing their relevance to past, present and future local and global problems. Taken this way, human rights could easily be
incorporated into the curricula of any country, no
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Kenan Çayır
matter how undemocratic it is. However, unless human rights are addressed in the context of national and
international politics and, in terms of the rights and
the responsibilities of the citizen, human rights education courses might improve a country’s image, but
they would not necessarily provide the basis for democratic citizenship.
Related to such a frame, another key requisite for
human rights education to be the basis for democratic citizenship is the recognition of the tension between the particularity of the concept of citizenship
and the universality of human rights. Citizenship today is bounded with a particular community, nation-state and culture. Human rights, on the other
hand, derive from universal principles that precede
the citizenship of any nation-state. The Council of Europe’s approach and the programme of Turkey’s new
course that consider human rights education and citizenship education on the same ground disregard this
tension. I do not mean that an ideal citizenship and
human rights education course should resolve this
tension. The tension between universal human rights
claims and particularistic national identities, as political philosopher Seyla Benhabib points out, is
“constitutive of democratic legitimacy. Modern democracies act in the name of universal principles which
are then circumscribed within a particular civic community” (2004, 44). The tension between citizenship
and human rights, therefore, is an inescapable face of
the modern nation-state. This tension, then, requires
the problematization of the relation between citizenship and human rights education. Rather than assuming that democratic citizenship could be developed
on the basis of human rights education, one should
be aware of the limits and challenges of citizenship
education and ask “what kind of civic culture does
the textbook promote?” Does it strengthen particularistic ties of the citizen or empower students to turn
into active national and global citizens? These questions around civic culture and citizenship also provide
us a ground to explore the programme and the textbook of the new Citizenship and Democracy Education course.
4. Problematizing the Notion of Civic
Culture to Make Sense of Citizenship
Education
A viable and stable democratic society requires not
only respect for human rights but also its citizens’
skillful and active involvement in politics to contribute to the solution of problems on the basis of
human rights and democracy. In order for children to
be transformed into democratic citizens, it is crucial
that they are enculturated into a civil identity and
civic engagement. Civil culture, according to Baumann, combines three elements: “Competence in relation to the workings of a country’s civil society;
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 22–30
competence with regard to its nationally specific conventions of civic culture and norms of civility; some
familiarity, conformist or hopefully critical, with its
dominant national self-representation” (Baumann
2004, 4). Competence, for Baumann, does not mean
compliance with something; it is rather “a capacity to
conform to or reject, play along with or undermine
dominant representations, all in a socially sharable
way” (2004, 4). Citizenship and human rights education programmes can be thought of as a means of
acquiring a capacity to unpack and critically evaluate
the dominant national codes in a democratic way.
Citizenship and Democracy Education coursebook,
in this regard, includes several progressive elements.
In a separate subtitle, it summarizes legal ways to defend one’s rights in courts of Turkey (Özpolat 2011,
38). The textbook also provides students few cases of
discriminations experienced by women, disabled people or migrants. However, these cases have not been
contextualized. For instance, women are said to be
stereotyped and discriminated against. Yet, the textbook does not present any facts and figures about
women’s problems in Turkey. Likewise, the textbook
involves some exemplary cases of discrimination towards disabled people, yet it gives no reference to
facts and figures regarding Turkish context. Such an
approach might make students discuss some hypothetical cases, but might not empower them to critically evaluate the Turkish context.
Lack of a sociological and political context in the
textbook might lead students to perceive human
rights knowledge as snapshots. For instance, students
might acquire the knowledge that “women’s right to
vote was recognized in 1934 in Turkey” (Özpolat 2011,
26). However, students do not learn about historical
conflicts and processes leading to the development
of women’s rights in both Turkish and the world context. Therefore, the current textbook seems to make
students acquire a competence in learning about
their rights, but this “competence” remains at an abstract level when human rights themes are presented
as if they occur in a political vacuum. As our study
(Çayır, Bağlı 2011) demonstrated, students, after studying a human rights education course might feel
vulnerable in the face of problems surrounding them.
Among course activities proposed by the MoNE,
few suggest teachers to use short films to bring human rights violations into the classroom. For instance,
one activity includes a worksheet that asks students
“which right is violated in the film?,” “what could be
the reasons for this violation?,” “what do you suggest
to prevent this human rights violation?” One could argue that such an activity might serve to make students become aware of human rights problems in
Turkey. However, those who are familiar to the dominant national codes already know that it is still difficult for teachers to make use of materials to draw
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Kenan Çayır
students’ attention to the need to hold governments
to be accountable for their actions. I do not here imagine an idealized context where students are freely
encouraged to be critical of the state. It is a fact that
citizenship education programmes in many national
contexts aim at strengthening the allegiance to nation and state. However, a comparison of civics courses in France might help us to make sense of the
Turkish case. In France, civics involves a critical assessment of certain aspects of national policy; for example, civics textbooks point out the rights of workers
to strike (Osler 2009). Inclusion of a strike from Turkish history in a textbook or discussing, with a film,
the right to strike, for instance, are still problematic
in the Turkish context.
The last chapter of the Citizenship and Democracy
Education textbook which reminds students about
their “duties and responsibilities” makes the dominant national civic codes explicit. This chapter includes passages about “our culture,” “cultural values” or
“social rules and social order.” The term culture is always referred to as a singular in the Turkish context.
There are no references to non-Turkish and non-Muslim groups living in Turkey. The textbook refers to
prophet Mohammad as “our prophet” (Özpolat 2011,
52) implying that it promotes a notion of culture disregarding non-believers and non-Muslims. If citizenship education is not simply a matter of knowledge of
human rights but also a matter of “how we think
about and behave towards others, particularly those
who differ from us in their race, religion, class etc.”
(Kymlicka 2001, 304), the current citizenship course is
far from providing such a perspective to pupils. Given
the strong state tradition, difference-blind civic republicanism and many ethno-nationalist practices in Turkey’s history, the last chapter of the textbook
endorses a civic culture which asks for a complete
compliance with the dominant national representations. Therefore, the new course, if I employ Baumann’s terminology, does not lead students to
develop a capacity to take a critical stance either to
reject or to conform to dominant representations, but
rather asks for an “unreflective patriotism” (Kymlicka
2001, 310) based on a one-dimensional reading of national history. This is not, however, possible in Turkey
any longer in the face of increasing demands of
non-Turkish and non-Muslim groups for their rights to
equal citizenship. Recent developments in Turkey demonstrate that there is a huge discrepancy between
the current social/political developments and the programme of the new Citizenship course.
5. Tension between New Identity-Claims
and Democratic Citizenship
The new Citizenship and Democracy Education
course, with its focus on human rights, implies that
educating people about their rights could be a basis
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 22–30
of democratic citizenship. I have been arguing that
without problematizing the link between human
rights, the notion of citizenship and the state, educating people about their rights might remain at an abstract level and does not empower students in
increasingly diversifying societies. A democratic society’s functioning requires the citizens to have not
only theoretical knowledge of rights but also a capacity to critically address current problems regarding
nation-state, democracy and citizenship. Any progressive course today should situate the notion of citizenship on local and international developments and
make students aware of opportunities of and challenges to classical nation-state structures and institutions.
The Turkish case constitutes a good example for
discussing the limits and the future of citizenship as
an allegiance to the civic republican nation-state. The
social scientific literature on the notion of citizenship
in Turkey bears a controversy over whether it is based
on a political or ethnicist logic. Some scholars argue
that Turkish citizenship involves both of them, and it
is possible to observe this double character of Turkish
citizenship in textbooks which include many references emphasizing sometimes territoriality, sometimes
ethnicity (Keyman, Kancı 2011). Some experts argue
that constitutional texts design Turkishness in terms
of political and legal status. Following the French model, “Turkishness designed by Turkish citizenship is
assumed to have nothing to do with being from a real
or an assumed ethnic origin” (Yeğen 2004, 55). Mesut
Yeğen, on the other hand, contends that the constitutional article noting: “Everyone who is tied to the Turkish State through citizenship ties is Turkish” could
also be read as an ethnic reference promoting exclusionary historical practices in the name of Turkishness
(2004). A close analysis of the Republican history indeed shows that practices do not accord with the abstract and political definition of citizenship (Aktar
2000; Yıldız 2001). The process of creating a nation-state and national citizenship in Turkey involved
several exclusionary and assimilatory practices towards Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Kurds, Alevis, Arabs,
Circassians, Lazes etc. The history reveals that Turkish
citizenship emerged as a membership to a Turkish
state defined on the basis of a single state-controlled
(Sunni) Islam and a single (Turkish) language
(Kadıoğlu 2007).
Not surprisingly, formal schooling was and still is
the key mechanism to produce citizens out of students coming from diverse ethnic, language-based
and religious differences. Recent developments in Turkey, however, indicate that schooling processes have
not totally succeeded in erasing cultural differences
and different memories. Although the present curriculum and the new course on Citizenship are still based on a monocultural vision, ethnic and religious
26
Kenan Çayır
minorities today are gaining public visibility and demanding their rights to full citizenship in Turkey. As a
result of global developments and Turkey’s accession
process to the European Union, non-Turkish and
non-Muslim citizens raise their voices for their equal
inclusion into public life. Kurdish groups, for instance,
are demanding their right to education in their mother-tongue; Alevi groups (non-Orthodox Islamic
groups) object to compulsory Religious Education
courses on the basis that it disregards their faith and
aims at assimilating them into the Sunni sect;
non-Muslim minorities raise their demands regarding
their freedom of religion; recently Circassians have also claimed their right to education and broadcasting
in their mother-tongue.
These differences, the existence of which has long
been denied at the official level, have for the first time
begun to be discussed in political life with the current
Justice and Development Party government’s recent
initiatives titled as “Kurdish expansion,” “Alevi expansion” or “Roma expansion.” The government convenes various workshops with the participation of
minorities in order to set a reform agenda for the recognition of rights of these minorities. Although some groups are suspicious about the intent of the
government, transcending the “denial policy” towards cultural differences at political level can be considered a progressive step in Turkey. It should also be
noted that liberal Turkish intellectuals also challenge
the official history, and they publicly campaign to recognize that Armenian and Kurdish massacres occurred before and during the Republican era. They, in
other words, have brought the unrecognized memory
of non-Turkish and non-Muslim minorities into the public agenda.
The increasing visibility of minorities and the public debate on identities and differences involve two
counter tendencies in tension with each other. It can,
on the one hand, help solve Turkey’s historical problems and thus deepen democracy, and the notion of
democratic citizenship. This is because Turkey, for the
first time, names its problems in explicit terms that
refer to minorities (‘the Kurdish issue,’) after a long
history of denial of their existence. It was a fact that
until 1990s using the word ‘Kurd’ publicly to denote
an ethnic group was a taboo (Dixon and Ergin 2010).
However, at the same time, the tension between the
majority and minority groups is increasing. The demands of Kurds or the debates concerning controversial segments of Turkey’s history lead some dominant
Turkish groups to take an aggressive stance towards
minorities. In the summer of 2010, there were lynching attempts towards Kurdish groups in some Anatolian cities. These are examples of the danger of
ethnic conflict in Turkey. A recent study on the hate
speech in the Turkish media has shown that the hate
speech against Armenians increases before every
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 22–30
April 24 (the date representing the genocide), and the
hate speech has also amplified towards Kurds after
“the Kurdish expansion” (Alğan, Şensever 2010).
Another recent study demonstrates that these debates on identity claims also show up in the classroom (Fırat 2010). In this study, students and
teachers were interviewed about their experiences
and perceptions on identity, peace, and conflict, especially regarding the Kurdish issue. It reveals that a
great majority of Kurds argue that they have been
and are being subjected to unpleasant and discriminatory practices in their schooling period. They point
out that they are stigmatized as “terrorists,” and that,
just after the PKK (the Kurdistan Worker’s Party) attacks teachers and classmates treated them as if
“[they] killed Turkish soldiers” (Fırat 2010, 25) . Kurdish informants argue that they start life and school
some steps behind Turks, since many of them speak
Kurdish at home and are introduced into Turkish for
the first time in school. And what bothers many Kurdish citizens most is their non-recognition in textbooks. They note that Kurds have no presence in the
textbooks although they have fought together with
Turks in the War of Independence and contributed to
the formation of the Turkish Republic. The study also
demonstrates that teachers find themselves incompetent to respond to students’ queries about differences
or to handle their discriminatory utterances towards
minority groups.
All these findings indicate that it is no longer possible to inculcate in students a supposedly monolithic
national culture. Nevertheless, the new Citizenship and
Democracy Education course is still based on Turkishness with a single language and a single culture. Ethnic and cultural differences still receive no mention in
the new course. There is an apparent reference to the
“differences” in the programme. Among the values the
course aims to instill in students are “respect for differences” or “awareness of discrimination.” However,
the textbook, under the subtitle “What is the use of
our individual differences for our society?” presents
only physical differences between people or occupational differences leading to the functioning of society
(Özpolat 2011, 13). An activity proposed by the MoNE
suggests students to imagine themselves in an island
and think of their “individual differences” to contribute to collective life (MEB 2010). The term “difference”
throughout the textbook is used to refer to different
individual skills or capabilities. As these passages and
activities suggest, within the current curriculum, it is
still unimaginable for the textbooks to refer to ethnic
differences or other social cleavages in Turkey.
Arguably, it is not easy in Turkey to refer to ethnic
or religious differences in formal education because of
the current legal structure and the dominant political
culture. It is true that the Constitution and the Basic
Law on Education are very restrictive regarding the re-
27
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Kenan Çayır
presentation of cultural differences. The Basic Law
promotes that education should be based on “the Atatürk nationalism” in order to protect “the spiritual
and moral values of the Turkish nation.”1 However, the
rising politics of recognition of non-Turkish and
non-Muslim minorities indicate the need of a new political framework and a new notion of citizenship that
Turkey should develop in order to equally include different groups and interests. Clearly, the current model
which puts an emphasis on the unity and indivisibility
of the nation along with the non-recognition of ethnic
differences is no longer effective in Turkey.
There are several studies demonstrating that difference-blind and liberal assimilationist notion of citizenship does not provide a framework in many
national contexts. As Banks notes global immigration
and the increasing diversity in nation-states challenge
liberal assimilationist model of citizenship which asks
people to give up their languages and home cultures
to fully participate into public life (Banks 2008,
129-130). It is a fact that European states and schools
of major cities today have become multi-ethnic as a
result of international migration. Therefore it is now
impossible to teach these pupils “to feel German” or
“to be proud of being Dutch” (Baumann 2004, 3). Similarly, Turkey can no longer maintain an assimilationist, difference-blind and nationalist education.
There are, on the other hand, some suggestions for
a notion of multicultural citizenship that involves the
recognition of group rights and cultural rights within
a democratic platform (Kymlicka 2001; Banks 2008). It
should be noted that the recognition of group rights
and identities is not an entirely unproblematic process. Experiences of countries where educational processes are based on a multiculturalist understanding
show that free expression of identities might also involve several problems. Research shows that without
an equal status and equal perception of identities,
ethnic minorities who are always reminded of their
ethnic identities may feel that there is a distance between themselves and dominant identities. A Turkish
boy in an English school, for instance, points out that
“you can not overcome ethnic descriptions and ethnic
belonging” (Mannitz 2004, 277). Thus, identities
might turn into iron cages for minority groups.
There are also other suggestions to develop new
notions of citizenship. Some scholars today draw attention to the necessity to dissociating civic engagement
1
Article 1 of the Basic Law on Education defines the general goal
of the national education system as follows: To raise all individuals as citizens who are committed to the principles and reforms of Atatürk and to the nationalism of Atatürk as expressed in the Constitution, who adopt, protect and promote the
national, moral, human, spiritual and cultural values of the Turkish Nation, who love and always seek to exalt their family,
country and nation, who know their duties and responsibilities
towards the Republic of Turkey (MEB 2001).
from national status. They point out to the necessity
of transcending (not necessarily removing) the nation-state citizenship. Soysal, for instance, proposes a
post-national citizenship since “nation” is not anymore
“a meaningful definer of the contemporary state, given the intensification and interconnectedness of the
global system and the penetration of national dominions by supranational discourses” (1994, 165) Osler
and Starkey, on the other hand, contend that education should promote a “cosmopolitan citizenship that
helps young citizens to recognize their common humanity, make connections between their own lives and
those of others and operate effectively in contexts of
cultural diversity and change” (2005, 78).
Debate on different notions of citizenship provides
a ground to reflect upon the Turkish case. Yet, it
needs to be acknowledged that the picture is not
clear for Turkey. This is because identifying the overarching values and concepts that might hold Turkish
society together while incorporating the diversity of
its citizens require further information from the field.
In other words, we need further field research in order to be able to build up a democratic framework
and an education for democratic citizenship. This research needs to be conducted in an interdisciplinary
way that links the field of education to wider social
science literature. The current heated debates over
the development of a civil constitution2 in Turkey
might open up opportunity space for the development of a new notion of citizenship and citizenship
education.
6. Conclusion
Contemporary Turkey has been undergoing a major
social and political transformation regarding its
political, social and educational structure. It is questioning the boundaries of democracy and differenceblind citizenship regime as a result of rising demands
of its non-Turkish and non-Muslim minorities for
equal citizenship. In order to remove formal and informal barriers to full citizenship for different groups,
Turkey needs to develop a new legal constitutional
framework and a new pluralist imaginary. This is not
an easy process since it requires questioning established identities and the official history. Education
can play a crucial role in developing a new imaginary
that would allow peaceful coexistence of different
identities and interests.
The introduction of the new Citizenship and Democracy Education course could be an important intervention to promote democracy and democratic
citizenship. A distinct course can draw teachers’ and
students’ attention to the necessity of educating
2
It is called ‘civil’ because, so far, constitutions in Turkey have
been introduced after military coups.
28
Kenan Çayır
youth on both the practice and the underlying values
of democracy and human rights in a rapidly changing
world. This course has several new progressive objectives compared to the former programmes. Regarding
its content, this course focuses on human rights themes and seems to be based on the assumption that
human rights education all by itself and necessarily
promotes civic engagement and democratic citizenship. However, this may not be achieved since the
course includes various human rights themes without making any connections to the problems of the
notion of citizenship in Turkey. Human rights, in
other words, are inevitably contextualized into a difference-blind Turkish nation-state citizenship. Its programme has not been developed on a new ground
and a rationale addressing the necessities of present
Turkey. It may not, then, empower students who are
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 22–30
aware of conflicts around politics of recognition. For
such an empowerment, the notion of citizenship
needs to be problematized in relation to relevant national and international contexts and a universal human rights perspective is to be employed to expand the
scope of nation-state citizenship.
There are, of course, many theoretical and practical problems in terms of transforming the dominant
national representations, and achieving equal inclusion of cultural differences. However, Turkey needs to
look for ways to denationalize citizenship, recognize
differences and devise an educational structure to
promote the culture of democracy and human rights.
The new Citizenship and Democracy Education course
begs the question of “how can we teach students to
respect the rights of others when those ‘others’ do
not exist in textbooks?”
29
Kenan Çayır
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 22–30
References
Aktar, Ayhan. 2000. Varlık Vergisi ve ‘Türkleştirme’ Politikaları [Property Tax and Turkification Policies]. İstanbul.
Banks, James A. 2008. Diveristy, Identity and Citizenship
Education in a Global Age. In: Educational Researcher, Vol.
37, No. 3, 129–139.
Bauman, Gerd. 2004. Introduction: Nation-state, Schools
and Civil Enculturation. In: Schiffauer, Werner; Baumann,
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Çayır, Kenan; Bağlı, Melike T. 2011. ‘No-One Respects Them
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Keyman, E. Fuat; Kancı, Tuba. 2011. A Tale of Ambiguity:
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Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 17, No. 2, 318–336.
Kymlicka, Will. 2001. Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism,
Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. Oxford, New York.
Mannitz, Sabine. 2004. Pupils’ Negotiation of Cultural Difference: Identity Management and Discursive Assimilation.
In: Schiffauer, Werner; Baumann, Gerd; Kastoryano, Riva;
Vertovec Steven, eds. Civil Enculturation, Nation-state,
School and Ethnic Difference in the Netherlands, Britain,
Germany and France. London.
Pingel, Falk. 1999. UNESCO Guidebook on Textbook Research and Textbook Revision. Hannover.
Soysal, Yasemin. 1994. Limits of Citizenship: Migrations and
Post-National Membership in Europe. Chicago.
Tibbitts, Felisa. 1994. Human Rights Education in Schools in
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Boundaries of Turkish National Identity]. İstanbul.
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© JSSE 2011
ISSN 1618–5293
Nathalie Muller Mirza
Civic Education and Intercultural Issues in Switzerland: Psychosocial
Dimensions of an Education to “Otherness”
In contemporary democratic societies that deal with cultural and linguistic diversity, education faces new challenges such as how to promote a shared knowledge and competence framework about “citizenship,” how to
prepare the young generation to enter a complex world, and how to help immigrant students to integrate into
the school system. Some of the European recommendations focus on the importance of promoting “intercultural education”. However, so far little is known about concrete practices and their outcomes. This paper aims at
documenting and providing elements of reflections about the difficulties and contradictions faced by both
teachers and students involved in pedagogical intercultural activities in Switzerland. From the results of a
qualitative research based on a sociocultural perspective, identity and institutional issues of addressing “otherness” in school are discussed. It stresses the importance of a frame in order to allow elaboration and transformation of personal and emotional experiences into thinking and reflexive processes.
Keywords:
intercultural education, citizenship education, identity, learning, qualitative research
1. Citizenship Education and
(Inter)Cultural Issues
Democracy is affected by new challenges. One of
these is to provide new definitions to the notion of
citizenship in complex societies dealing with cultural
and linguistic diversity. The question of social cohesion is addressed: how might members of a multicultural society develop shared representations, goals
and values? How might they address differences and
contradictory points of view in a constructive way?
How might they face differences? School is traditionally expected to provide a frame for the integration of
diversity. In the European context, each country develops its own way of promoting civic knowledge and
the “ability to engage effectively with others in the
public domain, and to display solidarity and interest
in solving problems” (as it is stipulated in the “key
competences for lifelong learning” published by the
European Community, 2007). In this perspective, education is expected to reach a double objective: not
only to help immigrant students to better understand
the school and social system of the host country, but
also to promote in all students – whatever their cultural, religious, and national backgrounds – social and
cognitive instruments that allow them to enter a complex multicultural society.
However, this attempt of promoting what is called
an “intercultural education” faces questions and tensions that might have consequences on the way teachers and students conceive it. One of these questions
refers to the contents – the objects that are meant to
be taught – that are not well defined in official documents and are particularly heterogeneous: they belong to social sciences (the reasons of international
migration, North-South economic and social exchanges, etc.), but they also relate to personal and social experiences (migration experiences in the family,
interpersonal relationships, stereotypes and discrimination processes, etc.), are close to know-how, and to
ethical and moral values. As they are based on personal and social knowledge, they are tightly related to
identity issues for both teachers and students
(Grossen, Muller Mirza 2010). The question is thus: are
these objects teachable in school? Do they not belong
instead to the family sphere? How is it possible – if so
– to develop a process of “decontextualisation and recontextualisation” of the personal experiences, which
is the main characteristic of reflexive thinking in
school? Moreover, is there not a risk to maintain and
even construct “cultural” problems that do not exist in
the classroom? Another paradox can be highlighted.
On one hand one observes political initiatives which
seek to promote a “critical citizen” ready to participate
to the society in which she lives, to demonstrate autonomy, to be able to cooperate and resolve conflicts
amicably in the frame of the legislation (Audigier
2006); on the other hand, the school institution provides what can be called a “school form” (la forme scolaire, in French), involving a separation between the
“student” and the “child”, a strong “disciplinarisation”, directive and knowledge-focused pedagogical methods, the subordination to rules and authority
that are not objects of negotiation (Vincent 2008). An
important gap between policy statements and the
school practices appears that some authors describe
as an “organizing hypocrisy” (Rus 2008). In this context, it seems important to provide information related to actual teaching practices and the challenges
faced by both teachers and students when intercultural education lessons are set up in classrooms.
The overall aim of the study to be reported in this
paper is therefore to provide elements of discussion
about the way teachers and students give meanings
to this education and the psychosocial processes that
are at stake. It is claimed here that teaching and learning “intercultural” topics is certainly not usual and
mundane at all. What do the teachers choose as objects of knowledge? How do they design their les-
31
Civic Education and Intercultural Issues in Switzerland: Psychosocial Dimensions of an Education to “Otherness”
sons? How do the students make sense of these
objects? After an introduction related to definitions of
intercultural education and its historical framework,
I1 present the main results of an empirical study set
up in 6 classrooms in Switzerland. Adopting a psychosocial perspective, I examine both teachers’ and students’ perspectives on intercultural education issues.
2. Intercultural Education: A Shift of
Paradigm?
In September 2007, the Arizona State Board of Education adopted the 4-hour block Structured English
Immersion [SEI] model, requiring all school districts
to implement the model from Kindergarten through
12th grade. Consequently, it meant that young immigrants or students who were not fluent in English had
to spend 4 hours of English lessons per day, and these
lessons focused mainly on English language. The proclaimed goal was to enable students to become fluent
or proficient in one year. However, as a research carried out by the University of Arizona showed (Gandera, Orfield 2011; Rios-Aguillar, Gonzalez-Canche,
Moll 2010), this instructional program reached results
that were different from those expected. It seems
that the students experienced a kind of segregation
and that the separation from English speaking peers
was not only harmful to their learning (the majority
of them were not meeting grade level standards) but
also to their self-esteem as they were stereotyped as
slow learners. This anecdote is interesting as it sheds
light on the paradoxical effect of education focusing
on minorities or immigrant populations. The pedagogy chosen is a good example of what Michael Cole
calls the "make the diversity go away" perspective:
“For many, the ‘English-only’ ‘throw them in the
water’ perspective is based on a straightforward assimilationist model of education designed to create a
common, American culture, generally one that is
Anglo-Saxon in origin, and Christian” (Cole 1998, 293).
This perspective on minority education is also in
force in Europe. It originated in the period just after
the 1950s when many European countries faced a
high immigration flow. Teachers and politicians focused their attention on overcoming linguistic problems
in school: instructional measures for learning the host
countries’ languages were set up. An emphasis was also placed on the opportunity to “preserve” students’
languages and cultures of origin so that a return to
their native country could be possible. Over time, however, this concept has been criticized “as the risks of
a ‘compensatory’ and ‘assimilatory’ pedagogy became increasingly visible” (Portera 2008, 482). No consideration was given to the relationship between the
1
The study described in this paper is a collective work as it involved junior researchers and colleagues (see “Acknowledgments”) but I report on the results alone here.
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 31–40
immigrant students and the other students, nor to
the connections between first and second language
learning or to the role of the teaching of a second language in enabling or disabling access to the school
curriculum (Perregaux, Ogay, Leanza, Dasen 2001).
The double-edged sword of this approach became perceptible: “This led to the deepening of the racism of
the dominant and majority populations who defined
‘the others’ by their ‘ethnicity’” (Gundera, Portera
2008, 464). The students were labeled as being disadvantaged and it constructed issues of difference in
terms of “deficit.”
Since the 90s (for making short!), new terms, definitions and approaches have developed (Abdallah-Preitcelle 2004; César, Kumpulainen 2009; De
Haan, Elbers 2009; Kumpulainen, Renshaw 2007). In
Europe, the perspective of an “intercultural approach”
grew up and tried to take into account the main criticisms that were addressed to the original form of this
approach (mainly an epistemological and theoretical
weakness, and a risk of reinforcing the stereotypes towards the immigrant populations). The Council of Europe defined intercultural education in terms of
reciprocity based on the idea that interactions contribute to the development of co-operation and solidarity rather than to relations of domination, conflict,
rejection, and exclusion (Rey 2006). In this perspective, a main concern is to regard children of immigrants no longer as a “problem” or “risk” but as
“resources.” The education of minorities is undertaken with consideration of the dynamic character of individuals’ cultures and their identities. Moreover, this
education is not merely addressed to immigrant or
“foreigners” students but to all the children in an
“inclusive” perspective (Unesco 2006). Indeed, if intercultural education is seen as empowering immigrant students and facilitating their integration
processes in the school system, it is also expected to
provide all students with communicative skills and intellectual tools in order to make them better able to
integrate into a multicultural and multi-linguistic society. Another main objective is to elaborate a “space
of sociability,” that means the development of dialogue and argumentation competencies leading to the
acquisition of shared rules and practices.
The shift is important. Some authors call it a
change of paradigm (Allemann-Ghionda 2002). However, this shift also opens new questions and debates.
If the issue is no longer only the integration of immigrants into the social and school systems, how do topics like cultures, otherness and migration become
“objects of knowledge” in the frame of the classrooms? Such topics involve identity issues (“who I
am in relation with the others”) that are socially and
emotionally loaded. How are these topics introduced
into the classrooms and understood by both teachers
and students?
32
3. Observing Actual Practices in
Intercultural Education
3.1 Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in
Switzerland
Before presenting the general scope of the study, it
might be helpful to understand the specificities of
the national context in which the research questions
have been raised. Concerning (inter)cultural issues,
Switzerland certainly provides interesting features,
but also some contradictory dimensions. Switzerland
is often seen as the paradigm of a multi-linguistic and
multiethnic country since it is composed of “Cantons” which are respectively German, French, Italian
and/or Romance speaking (German, French and Italian are official languages at the national level within
the Federal administration of the Swiss Confederation). However, each region tends to manage the linguistic issue within the borders of its territory: Swiss
Cantons are in this perspective relatively monolinguistic. Furthermore, related to diversity, Switzerland has a high level of foreign residents compared to
other European countries. At the end of 2010, the
number of foreign residents amounted to 1.7 million
persons, corresponding to 22.4% of the total permanent resident population. The majority of them originate in EU/EFTA member states.2 This rate can be
explained by two main factors: by the fact that the
calculation includes persons born in Switzerland to
foreign-national parents (native-born foreigners —
also known as the second generation — made up 22.3
percent of the foreign-resident population at the end
of 2007), and also since Switzerland has a low naturalization rate, with just 2.9 percent of foreigners
naturalizing in 2007.3 However, in this country known
for its neutrality and its active role in diplomatic
peace processes at the international level, the media
and political rhetoric over immigration has been
heated in recent years. The right-wing Swiss People's
Party (UDC – Union Démocratique du Centre) takes a
significant place among the four parties represented
in the Federal Council.
At the level of compulsory education, cultural and
linguistic heterogeneity is significant. More than 85%
of the classrooms are heterogeneous in terms of students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds. However,
the school system remains mono-linguistic and mono-cultural: the privileged instrument used to respond to this reality is to set up compensatory settings
which do not take into account knowledge and contri2
Among the most represented nationalities in 2010 were Italians (16.3%) and Germans (14.9%), followed by Portuguese
(12.0%) and Serbs (6.9%), according to official government statistics)
(http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/en/index/
themen/01/02/blank/key/bevoelkerungsstand/02.html,
retrieved November 20, 2011).
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 31–40
butions from foreign students (Lanfranchi, Perregaux,
Thommen 2000). In the last few years, however, teachers have become more sensitive to an “intercultural
approach” during their initial training, but in very diverse ways as assessed by a national report published
in 2007 (Sieber, Bishof 2007).
3.2 Aims and Conceptual Frame of the Study
The study reported here aimed at describing and analyzing teaching-learning situations related to intercultural education issues. It mainly focused on the
following questions: what are the meanings the
teachers give to this education? What do they identify
as “objects to be taught” when they teach “intercultural education”? What difficulties do they face? How
do the students understand what they are supposed
to learn? What misunderstandings are liable to
emerge from these situations? The main focus of the
study was on the meaning-making processes of both
teachers and students in their way of interacting and
defining “cultural” issues. It therefore adopted a
socio-cultural framework in psychology (Bruner 1990;
Cole 1996; Hanano, Wertsch 2001; Wertsch 1991)
which assumes that “it is by analyzing what people
do in culturally organized activity, people-acting
through mediational means in a context, that one
comes to understand the process of being human”
(Cole 1998, 292).
3.3 Research Design
From this theoretical framework, we designed a qualitative research and focused on the following dimensions: on discourses and actual practices teachers
developed in their attempt to “do” intercultural education, and on interactions between teachers, students and their use of pedagogical materials. The
study had a three-step structure: we first conducted
an interview with the teacher before the pedagogical
activity itself in order to get a picture about his/her
pedagogical intentions, representations and experiences about intercultural issues, and how s/he would
concretely design the activity; the second step was to
record the whole activity (which could last from 1 lesson of 45 minutes to 5 lessons). In the third step, we
conducted a second interview with the teacher and
focused on his/her feelings about what happened
during the activity and his/her satisfaction or surprises about the way the students reacted and
worked. We also had discussions with some of the students.
3
http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.
cfm?id=731, retrieved November 20, 2011.
33
The study was carried out in six classrooms of primary and secondary schools in the French-speaking
part of Switzerland. Four teachers participated on a
volunteer basis to the research during the years
2009 and 2010. They were asked to use one of the pedagogical materials that are at their disposal in a
center for Global Education specialized in intercultural education and sustainable development (FED4)
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 31–40
such as books, pictures and movies. All the materials
concern the relationship with “otherness” and/or
migration. In total, there were 105 students (39 in
primary school and 66 in secondary school) aged
from 4 to 16. We videotaped the lessons and audio-recorded the interviews. The following table provides some information about the contexts of the
observations:
Table 1. General Information about the Contexts of the Observations
Teacher
Type and name of the document
chosen by the teacher
Karoline* Child’s book (“This place is mine”
[Icic’est chez moi])**
School level
Number of the students and nationalities in the classroom
Primary school
(4–6 y.o.)
18 students
5 nationalities (other than Swiss)
Charles
Set of pictures (“Humanity on the
Primary school
move” [L’Humanité en mouvement])5 (8–10 y.o.)
9 students
all are first or second generation of immigration students
Charles
Short film (“Border” [Frontière]) 5
Primary school
(8–10 y.o.)
12 students
Tick
Set of pictures (“Humanity on the
move” [L’Humanité en mouvement])
Secondary school 20 students
(10–12 y.o.)
Emy
Book of novels (“A camel in the snow” Secondary school 22 students
[Un chameaudans la neige])5
(12–13 y.o.)
Emy
Book of novels (“A camel in the snow” Secondary school 24 students
[Un chameaudans la neige])
(15–16 y.o.)
*All the names have been modified.
**The documents:
· Ici c’est chez moi [This place is mine], 2007, J. Ruillier. Paris : Autrement
· L’humanité en mouvement [Humanity on the move]. 2005. Berne: Alliance Sud
· Frontière [Border] is a short movie taking part in a DVD called “Du respect pas du racisme” [Respect not racism!], 2004. Berne: Alliance Sud.
· Le chameau dans la neige [A camel in the snow]. 2007. Lausanne: Ed. d’en bas.
In the Canton de Vaud in which the research was carried out the proportion of foreign students (all
nationalities combined) exceeds 30%. When we asked
the students about their origins, many responded by
mentioning two nationalities. In some classrooms,
for instance Charles’s, the proportion of second or
first generation immigration students reaches 80%.
4. The Teachers’ Point of View
In the following section, I present the perspective of
the teachers on intercultural education: what are their
professional backgrounds? What are the origins of
4
FED is a Swiss Foundation called Fondation Education et Development, which promotes “Global Education” in schools. It aims
at supporting an education “that enables children to become responsible citizens in a globalized world. Therefore [it] provides
teaching materials, teacher-training, background information,
and advice about Global Education to teachers from elementary
school to high-school level” (www.globaleducation.ch).
their interest for intercultural issues? How did they
design lessons?
4.1 Teachers’ Perception about
(Inter)Cultural Issues
The four teachers who participated to the study all
have specific professional and personal backgrounds
that diversely orientate their interests in intercultural
education.
Karoline is a primary teacher who has more than
25 years experience teaching. She is interested in intercultural education for many years and has collaborated with the center for Global Education (FED) on
the Rights of the Child. She tries to take advantage of
the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of her students as much as possible, but she is also aware of the
risk as she thinks that they also can be used as instruments for discrimination.
Charles has taught for seven years in
“development classes” which are for students who
34
need an individualized program. In these classrooms,
learning objectives are similar to those provided by
the curriculum of regular classes but tailored to each
student's abilities. Charles’ pedagogical concern is to
facilitate a mutual respect among his students and to
promote conditions for “leaving together.” He claims
that students’ differences might be used as a
cross-fertilization tool within the group.
Tick is a secondary school teacher and teaches geography. He is also professor in a University of teacher
education. The issues of “otherness” and the perception of other groups are often raised in his lessons, for
instance when he teaches about the topic of tourism.
Emy has taught French in a secondary school for
more than 20 years. Multiculturality is an important
dimension of his school and classroom reality, but he
is not used to setting up specific pedagogical activities about intercultural communication.
When we asked the teachers about their understanding of “cultural issues” at school, the majority of
them responded that they did not face any problem
of that kind in their own class (racism or intergroup
violence) even though the majority of their students
do not have a Swiss passport. The teachers considered
cultural heterogeneity as a reality. The only problem
that was perceived concerned linguistic difficulties
(some students did not speak French at home and
their parents sometimes faced difficulties to understand what is expected by the school). In their opinion,
this might explain the lower level of some students in
terms of school achievement. All teachers said they
had a personal concern about this domain. They generally showed a positive attitude towards diversity considered as a resource rather than as a problem.
Concerning the concrete “intercultural” actions
the teachers are used to setting up, we can note three
different ways of dealing with these issues (these
perspectives were sometimes combined within a single person):
1. A reluctance to teach these topics and to organize
specific activities as they fear creating a problem
that does not exist as such and which might contribute to creating and maintaining stereotypes
(Emy, for instance, wondered if the “problem” did
not come more from the adults rather than the
children themselves);
2. Cultural diversity occasionally becomes a topic of
discussion when the teachers take the opportunity, for example the holy days in different countries or religions or the nationalities and languages
of the students;
3. An integrated perspective in which intercultural dimensions are part of education as a whole: teaching focuses on communication skills, for instance,
in order to make the students able to interact with
each other and understand various points of view.
For instance, Charles said: “integrating intercultural
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 31–40
topics like migration and diversity in school is very
important as it should allow us to shed light on
contributions from each member of the group and
stimulate the exchanges of points of view.”
The teachers thus showed not only their interest for
cultural dimensions but also their awareness of some
of the “traps” of these topics: how to take into account important issues like “cultural diversity” without constructing them in terms of “problems”? They
also demonstrated a willingness to focus attention towards the “interactional” aspects of this education.
How did they make this awareness concrete in the
pedagogical activities?
4.2 The Pedagogical Activities
It is interesting to observe that to some extent all
teachers set up activities in which the dimensions of
students’ emotions and communicative competences
were called upon. Here are some examples of the way
they designed the lessons and the topics they choose.
Example 1
A teacher, Charles, used a pedagogical material called
“Humanity on the move” that consists of pictures
which evocates migration and demography issues. In
a first step, he invited each of his students to choose
one picture among about twenty that were laid on a
table and asked them to write down one word they
associated with the picture. One after another they
had then to tell to the group the reasons why they
chose the picture and then the word they wrote. The
teacher explicitly tried to allow students to express
their “internal state”, like in this extract:
Extract 1
The teacher: I asked you the question, you said: “it
[the picture] made me think to my cousin”, ok, and
when you think to your cousin how do you feel [“ça te
met dans quel état?”]?
Example 2
With her young students of 4–6 years old, Karoline
chose a child’s book called “This place is mine”
[Icic’est chez moi], telling the story of a boy who
draws a circle on the floor all around him: he looks angry when a cloud, a rabbit or a leaf enter his circle. But
when another little boy is approaching, sees the line
and turns away, he feels sad and finally he invites the
newcomer to enter into his “place.” This story is meant by the teacher to be an opportunity to discuss
borders and their functions. Karoline started the activity by asking her students to experiment “bodily”
what a border means: in the gymnastic hall the children had to run around and to enter hoops as faster
as they can when music stopped, in order to “be protected from the storm;” she then helped students
who did not find their “home” to negotiate a space in
35
their mates’ hoops. The following activities focused
on discussions about the feelings they had when they
played with the hoops, and about the feeling of the
little boy of the story. In the following extract, Karoline tries to allow her students to explicitly show their
feelings when they were not able to enter a hoop:
Extract 2
The teacher: So, you stayed alone out of the hoop?
(…) And how was it? Did you feel at ease or not?
Later on, as she read the child’s book and showed
the drawings in the book, she asked the students’
group about the boy’s feelings on several occasions:
Extract 3
The teacher:
One child:
The teacher:
The child:
The teacher:
does he look happy?
no
how does he look?
angry
let’s all do the same like him, let’s find
the same position like him.
Example 3
With his 10–12 years old students, Emy reads a book
of novels, The Camel in the snow, written by men and
women active in the political and cultural life in Switzerland who describe their own experience of immigration. In this book, the authors explain the reasons
why they had to leave their country or region, the
feelings they had, and the challenges they faced in
the process of integrating in a new world. Some of the
stories are funny, others sad. All are about the way
immigration affects a person. The novels show not
only the process of acculturation but also the resources the authors found to go through the difficulties of this experience. Emy asked the students to
read and sum up some of the novels and invited them
to interview a teacher who used to work in their
school about her own experience when she arrived in
Switzerland from Poland a few years ago.
The above examples show that the teachers set up
intercultural activities as opportunities to work on
“relational issues” where feelings (their expression
and their recognition) took a significant place: migration, for instance, became an object of study as a subjective experience with its difficulties, surprises and
joys. The students’ attention was focused on the characters’ point of view to which they might connect
their own personal experiences. When the issue of
“crossing borders,” for example, was discussed with
the children it was from the perspective of the various actors of the situation, those who were “inside,”
the others who stayed “outside” of the borders, and
the feelings it generated. Teachers’ hypothesis (which
was more or less explicit in the interviews) was that
making their students able to recognize the others’
feelings and allowing them to express their emotions
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 31–40
are all powerful tools that might facilitate (intercultural) communication.
5. The Students’ Point of View
5.1 Meaning-Making Processes
Up to this point the pedagogical representations and
intentions of the teachers when they designed intercultural activities were examined. We can guess how unusual these kinds of practices may be for the students
who are used to focusing on objects of learning which
are well defined through textbooks. In such a context,
how do they interpret these activities? How do they
enter this specific game? In this section, let us examine the students’ meaning-making processes and show
some examples from interviews and observations.
When we asked Emy’s 24 students about what
they think they learned by engaging in the activity
about the novels, 17 responded that they learned a
lot: “it allows us to better understand people who leave their countries and have to move here;” “it is useful to know these things in order to behave more
respectfully towards immigrants;” “we’ll be more
open minded and kind towards foreigners because it
is really hard.” The teacher’s intention seems to be
properly reached: students are able to take into account another point of view and experience. However, we have to be aware that these responses may
also be consensual and normative responses, as no
other data have been gathered about the possible attitude changes of the children. At the question about
how familiar they were with these kinds of topics at
school, only 5 among 24 said that intercultural topics
have been discussed in school yet. We were also interested in how comfortable the students felt about a
discussion about “private” topics in the public space
of the classroom. Only 2 students responded they were used to talking about personal topics at school (“to
talk about my life, my family, my personal experiences.”) A result which is even more appealing: only 7
responded that they liked it. Some of the students
said that they prefer learning the names of country’s
capitals “because it is more useful.” And others said
they liked the activities, as it was “something different,” and they could go out of the classroom or
avoid the usual lesson.
5.2 Difficulty to Share a Definition of the
Situation
Some observations show another interesting aspect
of the students’ perspective: the difficulty they felt to
understand what exactly was expected from them.
Example 4
During the activity about the borders with the hoops
for instance, it seemed to be difficult for the young
children to understand that Karoline was trying to let
them express “what they felt”:
36
Extract 4
Karoline: You had to be 5, 6, 7 maybe 8 in the same
hoop, and what was difficult?
A child: When, when we are in the hoop a lot
Or later during the same activity:
Extract 5
A child (Jane): I wanted to go inside a red hoop but
Mary did not let me in
Karo: so what did it make you feel? [“qu’est-ce que ça
t’a fait ?” – a question that usually leads to an answer
in terms of emotion, like for example: “I felt sad” or
“angry”, etc.]
Jane: and there were no room
Karo: so what did it make you feel when there is no
room?
Jane: err one has to go in another hoop…
Example 5
In a class with older children, a funny interaction occurred which shows that the school “routine” frames
the interpretation and leads the students to provide
answers that are not relevant, in the eyes of the teacher at least. Tick, who chose the material “Humanity on
the move,” decided to initiate his 10-12 year old students to analysis of the pictures. He explained that
the photographer has intentions that might explain
the choice of the topic, the framing and the structure
of the picture: to some extent, the reality is “constructed.” He also sought to make his students aware
of the feelings an image can produce. At a point of the
lesson, he asked a student about what she thought
when she looked at a picture showing a group of African children. She responded: “they are cute.” At his
question about what she meant by “they are cute” she
responded by spelling the word, interpreting the question as focused on a grammatical problem.
6. Discussion
In the aftermath of the events of September 11, the
Council of Europe Ministers of Foreign Affairs made a
“Declaration on cultural diversity.” They claimed the
relevance of promoting an “intercultural dialogue”
which should straddle all aspects of the society, including education. In this line, the Council of Europe
published a White Paper in 2008 that argues: “Intercultural dialogue can only thrive if certain preconditions are met. To advance intercultural dialogue (…),
the democratic governance of cultural diversity
should be adapted in many aspects; democratic citizenship and participation should be strengthened; intercultural competences should be taught and
learned; spaces for intercultural dialogue should be
created and widened; and intercultural dialogue
should be taken to the international level” (Council of
Europe 2008). In Switzerland, like in many European
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 31–40
countries, school authorities have introduced “inclusive” intercultural education in the teachers’ training and in the curricula in order to prepare the young
generation for the challenges of societies becoming
more and more multicultural and multi-linguistic and
to prevent violence and contribute to social equity. To
a certain extent, the teachers who participated with
the study echo these concerns by their choice to implement intercultural lessons in their own classrooms.
The research I have presented above aimed at documenting existing pedagogical activities teachers
set up with their students. It focused on the psychosocial issues of these “new” topics when they enter
classrooms, in particular when otherness becomes an
object of study from the point of view of both teachers and students.
Let us discuss some points that highlight what can
be called the “tensions” of intercultural education:
tensions between, on the one hand, the official discourse - the idealized project of an intercultural education which would promote equality and peace - and
on the other, the intercultural education as it is actualized and interpreted by its main actors.
When they design intercultural education lessons,
the teachers seem sensitive and aware of the risk of
contributing to a “culturalization” of the interpersonal relations and the reinforcement of stereotypes and
prejudices. In their eyes, it is as if to speak about
them could make them exist. This “paradoxical effect” of intercultural education has also been reported
in other studies and addressed in theoretical works
(Grossen, Muller Mirza 2010; Ogay, Edelmann 2011).
In order to avoid this possible effect, the teachers
choose not to teach about “cultures” as if they were
pre-existing entities, but merely to address the interactional dimension of culture, i.e., the relationship
one might construct toward “the others.” This ethical
and epistemological perspective has two important
practical consequences: teachers set up activities that
focus either on the processes of “producing otherness” (for example, the activity about the functions of
the borders), of “constructing reality” (for example,
the activity about the way a picture re-presents the
world), or on the subjective and emotional experience
of the students themselves or of other characters (the
activities focusing on the expression of emotions felt
by the students related to pictures for instance, or
about the feeling immigrants might have when they
leave their country and move in a new environment).
This shift is interesting and echoes what is meant
by an “intercultural approach” from the Council of Europe, for example (Rey 2006). However other questions are raised, and the way some students react to
these lessons might lead us to open new reflections.
Students’ reluctance towards evocation of personal
experiences at school is an interesting aspect to take
into consideration. It poses the question of the rela-
37
tionship between private and public spheres at school:
is school the place in which raising topics that might
perhaps belong in the family and the private individual sphere? What could the psychological cost of crossing the borders be? It can be interesting to listen to
the students and their own expectations. For example,
in another study a girl responded to a researcher and
said: “hopefully school exists!” (Rochex, Kherroubi
2004), as if she could find a refuge there where nobody asks her for any explanation about what life she lives out of school, her cultural or national backgrounds.
The question raised does not suppose normative or
simple answers. Instead, it leads us to pay attention to
the way the students experience the relationships between the different contexts, inside and outside school,
and the meaning they attribute to a given object of
knowledge within these contexts (César, Kumpulainen
2009; Grossen, Zittoun, Ros 2011; Zittoun 2007).
Another issue concerns the relationship between
emotions and cognition or consciousness. Following a
sociocultural perspective, emotion and cognition are
not separated entities (Audigier 2005; Muller Mirza forthcoming), and should be understood as deeply embedded within the “dynamic of human life” (Vygotsky
1987, 333). In his theory of development, Lev Vygotsky
claims that, like other psychological functions, emotions develop in an interpersonal and social level first
and then move towards an intrapersonal level. He stressed the idea of a process of “socialization of emotions”
and wrote: “the knowledge of an emotion changes this
emotion and changes it from a passive into an active
state. That I think about things outside of myself does
not change anything in them, but that I think about
emotions, that I place them in other relationships to
my intellect and other instances will change much in
my psychological life. To say it more simply, our emotions act in a complex system with our concepts”
(Vygotski 1987, 125). In this perspective, emotions are
dynamic psychological and social processes that are
connected to thinking and learning. Vygotsky highlights the reflexive move of the emotion when it becomes an object of attention which affects and changes
the “psychological life.” This perspective can be related
to the notion of “secondarisation,” this dialectical process of reconfiguration of everyday experience into a
form of conceptualized knowledge that places it within
a broader framework and takes it as an object of reflection (Grossen 2009; Jaubert, RebieRebière 2001; Rochex
1995, Valsiner 2002, Zittoun 2007). We can therefore easily understand that engaging the students to express
their personal emotions is not enough and that a specific interactive work that leads to secondarisation would
be important, but maybe particularly difficult due to
the nature of the topics at stake (Muller Mirza, Grossen,
Grand 2011). It seems also that the elaboration of a
“frame” is important, in which rules, finalities and actors’ positions are well defined. In the observations of
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 31–40
intercultural activities, it was fascinating for example
to see how a teacher, Charles, introduced the activity
about the pictures to his students. He took five minutes at the beginning of the lesson and explained the
instructions, the communication rules, the attitudes he
expected. He showed a strong awareness of the difficulty of the activity in which the students were invited to
express personal experiences and affects: it was important to him that all of them might speak if they wanted, listen to the others and did not make jokes or
personal judgments. In such a “thinking space”
(Perret-Clermont 2004, 2009), the students had been
able to not only share personal narratives and emotions to the group but also construct knowledge that
had a collective relevance. This observation sheds light
on the importance of mediational resources that allow
personal experiences and emotions to be reconfigured
in a way that can be elaborated as shared knowledge.
The observations in classrooms show another tension. It is interesting to observe that the students are
so familiar with the usual “school form” that they
look surprised when teachers’ expectations are not
oriented toward the body of knowledge of a discipline. The didactic and communicative contracts that
usually affect the relationship between teachers and
students and define their status and roles might be
challenged in the pedagogical settings of intercultural
lessons. However, these new objects and the interpersonal reconfiguration that entail might face the traditional school form which stays largely “monological”
and discipline-oriented (Chronaki, 2009).
All these points have to be discussed and examined
in the light of other observations. Accounting, describing and analyzing teachers’ practices (in a close collaboration between teachers and researchers) are
necessary in order to think together about the psychosocial and institutional issues of educating for diversity. Providing children with such tools that allow them
to create reflexive and dialogical identities are part of
the school agenda and this effort has to be supported.
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to the students who attended the
course “Fieldwork in social psychology” (2009 and
2010) at the University of Lausanne and carried out
observations under my supervision; they provided
me with very valuable comments.
The study reported in this paper is the first step of
a larger research currently held called “Transformation of emotions and construction of knowledge:
identity in classroom practices in intercultural education” (prof. Michèle Grossen), supported by the Swiss
National Science Foundation (100013_1322/92). The
ongoing fieldwork and analysis conducted together
with Michèle Grossen, Stephanie de Diesbach-Dolder
and Laura Nicollin have contributed to the writing of
this paper.
38
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 31–40
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© JSSE 2011
ISSN 1618–5293
Jukka Rantala
The Reflection of a Warlike Historical Culture in the Attitudes of Finnish
Youths
Two school shootings took place in Finland in 2007–2008, in which 20 people lost their lives. After the shootings, foreign journalists used the violent culture of Finnish men as an explanation for the tragedies.1 Of the old
EU countries, the highest rate of capital crimes is found in Finland. The country has for a long time debated
where the violence comes from. One explanation is that the historical culture in Finland glorifies war. The wars
that were fought against the Soviet Union (1939–1944) have been elevated in Finland to become key elements
of the national psyche, manifested in celebrations, anniversaries and through family narratives. According to
this explanation, a Finn already learns as a child to accept violence which is considered to be legitimate and to
behave in accordance with warlike ideals. This article examines the warlike historical culture in Finland and clarifies why war has remained a popular theme of Finnish historical culture. Further, it discusses the impact that a
warlike historical culture has on the attitudes of young people.
Keywords:
Historical culture, historical consciousness, warlike
heritage, reminiscence narratives, Finnish adolescents
1. Wars as Significant Events in History
Although Finland is a country with a low level of
crime, the number of violent crimes committed in the
country is the equivalent of the European average.
Concerning capital crimes, Finland was the leading
country in the early 2000s prior to the EU’s inclusion
of new member states in. For Finnish men, violence is
not necessarily unacceptable. Marjut Jyrkinen and
Leena Ruusuvuori, who have researched violent behaviour, state that violence has almost always been
the way in which a Finnish man has resolved his issues. Physical restraint is not valued in the same way
as in other cultures. Late night fights at fast food takeaways are considered to be an integral part of Finnish male culture (Jyrkinen, Ruusuvuori 2002, 408).
It has been suggested that Finnish men cherish the
honour of the warrior ideal, in which the legitimacy of
the use of violence is connected to the right to defend
dearly held values. According to this way of thinking, a
Finnish man has always been able to fight fire with fire.
To retreat from a challenge is considered to be dishonourable. Some say that Finns grow up with this attitude from childhood and that violent behaviour has
been normalised in Finnish culture (Sarkamo 2007; Vuorikuru 2011; see also Kiilakoski 2009, 43). This attitude
can be partly attributed to exceptionally strong respect,
verging on worship, for warlike traditions, by international standards. Young people also grow up with an acceptance of violence through popular entertainment. War
films, books, comics, and, especially in recent years, war
games have strengthened the principle of respect for legitimate violence emanating from elsewhere in society.
The positive attitude of Finnish men towards the use of violence has been explained in several ways. So1
Suomen ulkoasiainministeriön mediakatsaus 1.10.2008.
me have linked the use of violence to the traumas
experienced by Finnish men in World War II and the
passing on of this to the following generations. Historian Henrik Meinander attempts to refute this claim
by showing that violent crime was actually more
common in Finland than in the other Nordic countries from the 1700s onwards. Meinander also blames
the high rates of violence on Finns’ excessive use of alcohol. (Meinander 2009, 359.) Other historians have
also considered the reasons to lie elsewhere than in
the historical culture (e.g. Lappalainen 2010).
There is clear evidence of the violent behaviour of
Finnish men, but there is no consensus as to its reason.
War is, however, strongly visible in Finnish historical culture. American historian Gordon F. Sander told about
how on his first visit to Finland, he was amazed how the
Finns spoke of the 1939–1940 Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union as if it had only concluded
the day before. Sander regards the Winter War as a
myth, similar to Finland’s national epic, The Kalevala,
which needs to be read to be able to understand the Finnish people and the state of being Finnish (Oksanen
2010; Sander 2010).
In the great national narratives the Winter War has
been regarded as the young republic’s test of manhood (Meinander 2009, 393). Henrik Meinander (2009,
395) has drawn attention to the fact that Finland’s Independence Day celebration is linked more to the Second World War than to events connected to Finland’s
actual independence in 1917. For decades, on every
Independence Day TV has broadcasted the Unknown
Soldier film, which takes place during the Continuation War (1941–1944) against the Soviet Union. In addition, the heroes of this war are traditionally the first
to step forward and meet the president at the president’s Independence Day reception. Almost half of
2
The Independence Day celebration at the Presidential Palace in
Helsinki is the most watched television programme in Finland. During the 2000s, the viewing figures have almost always exceeded
two million (Finland has a population of approx. 5.3 million).
41
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 41–49
Jukka Rantala
The Reflection of a Warlike Historical Culture in the Attitudes of Finnish Youths
the Finnish population follows the event live on TV,2
so this enhances the significance of the warriors as
the custodians of Finland’s independence. On Independence Day, the other television schedules largely
consist of programmes which are related to the Winter and Continuation Wars.3
The significance of war also appears strongly in research. The historical consciousness of young Finns was
clarified during the 1990s in the Youth and History Project and its associated national interview research.
Young Finns were found to have a nationally biased
view of history, and seemed to have a particularly thorough knowledge of the wars against the Soviet Union
(Ahonen 1997, A259–A261; Ahonen 1998). The great national narrative, which is built around war, has not even
in the most recent research been found to have deteriorated: data collected during the 2000s indicate that the
wars have remained in the minds of young people as some of the most significant events in history.4
War seems to interest young people of all ages.
Their views of wars constituting the most significant
events in history can be explained by the strong focus
on war in school teaching and popular culture. However, in Finland, an appreciation of war is developed at
an early age through the reminiscing of parents and
grandparents. Tragic accounts have been the driving
forces for family and ancestral narratives, and thus far
these have been built on the basis of war stories
(Meinander 2009, 397–398).
Children in Finland already become engaged with a
warlike heritage when they are small, as revealed in
recent research. According to Rantala (2011), children
aged 7–10 years have not yet read war-related books
or watched war-related television programmes, but
war has still been mediated to them through the narratives of their parents and grandparents. The power
of the stories heard at home is based on their subjectivity – through which the child can be connected
to the ancestral heritage experience. The narrative
situations are emotionally effective events, as the
child is then able to become part of the world of the
adults. Over the years, the child will hear the same
story many times, so the power of the story is also
based upon its many repetitions.
Why, then, do parents and grandparents talk to
their descendants about war? One explanation is that
war stories are considered to be more exciting than
those concerning everyday life. In researching the historical consciousness of 16–18-year-old Finns, Sirkka
Ahonen (1998) found that parents and grandparents
avoid such subjects, which they suspect young people will find boring. When young people are told
about past events, even briefly, only the most impressive pass through the self-censorship of parents and
grandparents. The narrative storytelling of the previous generations is connected to war, as they believe
this to be of greatest interest to the young. The question therefore appears to concern the attitudes of the
parents and grandparents. It also concerns the connection of the individual’s own family to the great national narrative. Wars have also been highly visible in
school education, and, as mentioned, in historical culture in general. As previously highlighted, the media
reporting surrounding the anniversaries of the Finnish-Soviet wars, along with popular entertainment,
have raised the wars to be the key issue in the national history. The act of being Finnish can be determined through the wars. For example, the leading
politicians in Finland use war-related concepts in their
speeches. They speak of “the spirit of the Winter War”
in attempting to motivate the population to pull together to achieve common goals. All Finns are supposed
to understand the meaning of the concept.5 When the
wars are displayed in public as constituting the core
of discussions on being Finnish, parents and grandparents also consider it to be important to tell their descendants about their own family’s links to them.
Sakari Suutarinen has expressed concern about
the transmission, through the teaching of history, of
the image of Russia as an enemy of Finland. According to Suutarinen (2000, 118), the state of being Finnish has been constructed along with the image of
Russia as a threat or enemy, and history textbooks ha-
3
6
2. War as a Core Theme of Reminiscence
Narratives
4
5
During Independence Day in 2010, the channels of the national
broadcasting company, YLE, broadcast 7 hours and 45 minutes
of programmes which were related to the Winter and Continuation Wars.
Hakkari 2005, 74; Virta 2009; A warlike history is not only a
Finnish phenomenon. Emphase on war have also been found
elsewhere. War appears on the list of the most memorable and
relevant topics in the teaching of history all over the world; see
Barton, Levstik 2008; Yeager et al. 2002; Brophy, VanSledright
1997, 81–82; Lee 2002; Barca et al. 2004, 39, 41.
The Winter War spirit means national unity, which is regarded
to have made it possible for Finland to preserve its independence. The Finns fought together as one and prevented the conquest of the country by the Soviet Union. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_the_Winter_War.
Earlier, textbooks were seen as dominant in the teaching. In
Finland, the national Board of Education revised textbooks up
to the 1990s. However, many recent studies claim that textbooks no longer play as big a role in the development of historical understanding among youth (f. ex. Haydn 2011; Wineburg
et al. 2007, 69–70).
42
Jukka Rantala
ve played a significant role in forming this image.6
These attitudes, however, seem to have also been passed on to children, even before entering school. A study concerning Finnish children aged 7–10 years,
showed that almost all of the children were already
aware of the wars between Finland and the Soviet
Union before learning about them at school. Suutarinen is concerned that the enemy image mediated by
historical culture can also be identified today. The historical culture built around the Russian/Soviet threat
may be reflected in the negative attitudes of young
Finns towards Russia as well as Finland’s largest immigrant group, Russians.
In addition to the historical enemy images reflected at the present time, the adverse effect resulting
from war stories, is also linked to the children’s and
young people’s expectations for the future. Along
with environmental pollution, one of young Finns’
greatest fears is an increase in violence (Seppänen
2008; Rubin 1998). In the world of a child, talking
about war could also mean an increase in the threat
of violence. When children are told a great deal about
wars, they may form an understanding of these kinds
of events which are beyond peoples’ control. Finnish
children may also begin to think that the country’s independence had to be reclaimed through a war which
may need to be repeated in the future.
As young people approach their teenage years, the
role of their parents weakens while the importance of
their sphere of friends increases. During their teenage
years, young people are also able to freely access
other topics of historical culture and are no longer
tightly bound to the storytelling of their families. Further, their images of history begin to be influenced by
the popular entertainment culture, where war also
features prominently.
The existence of a culture of violence is not necessarily a reason for violent behaviour. According to researchers who have studied school shootings,
’cultural scripts’ are just one of the five necessary conditions for school shootings.7 However, Tomi Kiilakoski, who has studied the subject in Finland, pays
special attention to the Finnish culture of violence as
an explanation of the Finnish shootings. We should
do so as well.
What is it about war that attracts young Finns? In
part, the answer lies in national great narrative as a
major unifying factor and a matter of pride. Finland
lost both wars with the Soviet Union. However, accor7
Katherine Newman and her colleagues (2004, 229–230) propose five factors which together explain violent rampages: 1) a
shooter’s perception of himself as extremely marginal in the social worlds that matter to him; 2) school shooters suffer from
psychosocial problems; 3) the failure of surveillance systems
that are intended to identify troubled teens before their problems become extreme; 4) gun availability; and 5) ’cultural
scripts’ that provide models for problem solving and that link
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 41–49
ding to a recent survey, Finns view the wars particularly as ’preventive’ victories, whereby Soviet Union
was prevented from occupying the whole country
(Torsti 2011). Young people are proud of the fact that
the Finns managed against a numerically superior
enemy. Comparing the attitudes of youth in the United States, for example, you will find the lack of a personal approach to war that Finns have (see Barton &
Levestik 2008, 250–251).
Warlike historical culture is a universal phenomenon. To a great extent, the attitude of the Finns dates
back to the strong culture of reminiscence which belongs to the ’unofficial’ vernacular history (Rantala
2011). Finnish ’official’ history also has very unique
features, for example the way Finns celebrate their Independence Days, how politicians refer to the attitude of Finns during the Winter War (1939–40), and
the popularity of war literature. The presence of a historical collective memory is an important factor in
shaping youth’s narratives about the past, as Jocelyn
Létourneau (2006, 80) has presented.
Although young Finns are especially interested in
the Second World War, other wars are also of interest.
Wars are dealt with a great deal in the teaching of history, but this does not explain why the young people
consider war to be more interesting than other historical topics. Young peoples’ interest in war can be explained by the interaction of a great many factors,
and commercial historical culture plays an important
role.
3. The Forms of Warlike Historical Culture
For many centuries, war has been an enduring subject in Finnish narrative culture. Wars were previously
discussed in poems, plays and novels. However, the
situation changed during the 1960s and 1970s when
comic strips surpassed other cultural products in
popularity, so much so that teachers became concerned: they were afraid that intellectually lightweight comics would pull boys away from more
serious reading. Such comic strips as Commando, Air
Ace, War at Sea and Action War Picture Library – translated from English and emphasising bravery and sacrifice – achieved great popularity in Finland,
particularly among boys.
During the 1960s and 1970s, comics were collected
by those whose fathers had lived during wartime. The
war comics perhaps in some cases acted as a kind of
compensation for the children whose relatives did not
manhood and public respect with violence. Newman et al.
(2004, 246, 252–253) profess that school shootings are the consequence of cultural scripts that are visible in popular culture.
Violent media is not solely to blame for rampant school shootings. However, books, television, movies, etc. provide school
shooters’ justification for random attacks.
43
Jukka Rantala
want to tell them about their own war experiences.
Above all, the war comics, were marketed in better
conditions in which young people had more money to
spend than previously and other forms of entertainment were still limited.
Boys in Finland read war comics, but switched to
war novels as they grew older. Nationalist popular entertainment did not suit official Finnish foreign policy
during the 1960s and 1970s, which sought to emphasise good relations with the former enemy, the Soviet
Union. According to Juhani Niemi (1988, 195), who
has researched the status of war literature in Finland,
the war books acted as a kind of therapy for the nation. Young people read them as fascinating accounts
of war, but the generation who had experienced the
war also experienced them as a counterweight to Finland’s accommodative foreign policy with respect to
the Soviet Union. War books remained on the
best-seller lists until the 1980s. Sales of war books were expected to begin falling along with the passing of
the generation who had experienced the war. However, the opposite occured. In Finland, the subject of
war became a permanent feature of fictional and non-fictional literature. War books have remained on the
best-seller lists from one year to the next.8
On average, one in five Finns actively reads
war-themed books (Niemi 1988, 202). Contrary to popular belief, the readership of war books does not
consist of older readers. War books are mainly read by
the young and middle-aged. There is a clear over-representation of men in the readership. To this day,
war books have retained their place at the top of
boys’ reading lists. Girls, however, have always placed
war books at the bottom.9
During the golden era of war comics, the 1960s and
1970s, a second form of historical culture emerged,
which reinforced boys’ interest in war – self-assembly
model kits. Even nowadays, the brands – Airfix, Revell,
Heller, Tamiya, and Monogram – raise fond memories
in a great many males aged 40 to 60 years. The interest
in assembling miniature models had spread around the
world (May 2010, 40; Ward 2009, 7). One of the most popular manufacturers, the British company Airfix, sold
20 million construction kits during their best years. Airfix’s target market – as with the makers of other self-assembly model kits – was mainly 7–15 years-old boys
(Ward 2009, 135). The factories produced relatively
low-cost miniature plastic models, so that young people could buy them with their pocket money.
8
9
Suomen Kustannusyhdistyksen bestseller-tilastot 2000–2009
[The bestseller ratings of the Finnish publication association].
E.g. Saarinen 1986; Niemi 1988; Stockmann et al. 2005; The polarized attitudes of boys and girls to war books is not only a
Finnish phenomenon. This has also been observed for example
in North America; see Fasick 1986.
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 41–49
The kits developed boys’ fine motor skills and patience, although they were provided guidance with
clear examples. The assembly of the plastic models required an almost total focus on the construction process; it is no wonder that those who built these
miniature models in their childhoods can still recognise the examples of their models many years later. In
itself, the monotonous assembly work also provided
the opportunity to exercise the imagination; while
gluing together the parts, the features of the miniatures could be pondered in a historical context. It is precisely this dimension of a historical imagination
which separates the building of plastic models from
the playing of modern computer games.
Nowadays, miniature model builders are served by
a vast number of different web sites and magazines,
some of which focus on the technical side of the assembly and some on the history of the models. Young
people are no longer so enthusiastic about models –
they would rather play computer and console games.
Over a number of decades, virtual games have achieved a strong position in the entertainment culture. Although girls nowadays play games in the same way
as boys, war games remain the domain of boys
(Bryce, Rutter 2006; Siitonen 2007, 23–24; Elkus 2006).
War games have a long history, but along with computers, war simulations have particularly grown in popularity. Simulations can involve the position of an
individual soldier in first person shooter games. With
these, a player is able to assume the role of an individual soldier in historic battles, such as the landing at Normandy, or current wars, such as U.S. troops fighting in
Afghanistan. Playing can even be compared to acting
in movies (Cowlishaw 2005). In strategy games, the
player can take the role of a leader of an combat group
or of a government. Such simulations are often based
on history, whereupon the appeal of the game is that it
is even possible to rewrite the history (Halter 2002, 2).
The impact of war games has been the subject of
debate for a long time. According to some researchers, war games increase the tendency of the players
to act aggressively (e.g. Gentile et al. 2004; Anderson,
Bushman 2001). Other researchers claim that players
understand that the violence in the games is just a
part of the play, as a means of progressing and advancing in the games (e.g. Kutner, Olson 2008; Olson et
al. 2008; Cragg et al. 2007, 59–61). Games have been
defended in a number of studies. For example, the
speed of the decision making of the players involved
in first person shooter games has been shown to have
increased due to playing these games (Stephen 2010).
The psychological effects of playing games are difficult to study, and it is difficult to clarify what effects
the historical games have on the players’ perceptions
of history. Brian Cowlishaw (2005) has referred to
players who, in their gaming, replay past wars whilst
at the same time determining different results. For
44
Jukka Rantala
example, young Americans may even perceive their
country’s Vietnam War as a victory.
4. The Impact of a Warlike Entertainment
Culture on Attitudes
Evidence has been presented, according to which, war
has generally lost its allure (Roach 2007, 14). This has
not been found to be true in Finland. Unlike in Britain,
war comics can still be found on shelves, in both
smaller stores and supermarkets. This illustrates the
fact that new generations have discovered the reading material. However, nowadays, for children and
young people, war is presented primarily through
new technological means. Computer and console
games involving war are the most popular games in
Finland.10
War games assist in shaping the attitudes of young
people. Otherwise, it would have been unlikely that
the U.S. Army would have developed its America’s Army computer game for the benefit of its recruitment
process (Cowlishaw 2005). While young people earlier
were inspired by slow-pace plastic model kits, or comic books, the young people of today indulge in the
reality of war through more expressive means. However, warlike historical culture products provide only a
rather simplistic image of war.
What kinds of impressions have these products
left? Some claim that war comics, for example, have
not biased their perception of the former enemies,
even though by the standards of today many of them
were anything but politically correct. The comics portrayed the fight of good against evil and the victory
of justice, and even if the allied soldiers in them call
the Germans Krauts and Jerries, and the Japanese
Japs and Nips, those who read them when they were
young generally do not believe that the comics gave
rise to negative attitudes towards these nationalities
(May 2007, 6; Roach 2007, 9).
Jerome de Groot has a different view. In his opinion, the vocabulary of war comics, together with an
aggressive sense of nationality, can be seen from time
to time in English tabloid culture, such as when the
German’s were labelled Fritzes during the 1996 European Football Championships (de Groot 2009, 6).
Such comics as Commando primarily feature fights
against cruel Germans and Japanese. In these, the
vast majority of Germans are evil Nazis and the Japanese are cruel war criminals. Occasionally, Germans of
integrity may come up against the Allied soldiers, but
they are exceptions. To be able to counter the risk of
generalisation, the reader should be able to read the
comics critically.
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 41–49
Entertainment products which depict war have
transmitted an attitudinal image of certain nationalities or categories of people. This, one could imagine,
may be reflected in the attitudes of the consumers of
these products. A critical citizen would be able to
identify attitudinal elements and assign their own values to these. An essential question here is whether a
hidden influence in the entertainment-related products would be noticed? Is our historical culture teaching us to glorify war, as has been claimed? Since
war has been continually present, especially in the
historical culture of boys, the next question then arises: how has it affected their attitudes, for example
towards the legitimacy of actions as a tool of international politics? There is also good reason to explore
whether attitudes which influence us when we are
children still have an impact on us as adults, and whether our nostalgic cultural heritage concerning war is
transferred to our children.
The current study is mere tentative attempt to answer these questions; the need exists for a large multidisciplinary study to be carried out in different
countries to answer them properly. Yet certain earlier
studies have been of interest. Some, for example, have suggested that boys’ socialisation through the traditional ideology of masculinity might be a potential
risk factor for violence among youths (see Feder et al.
2007, 386–387).
Popular culture has a wide range of effects, of
which some are difficult to see. Jeremy de Groot suspects that historical culture has helped to strengthen
the anti-Gallic attitudes of the British (de Grot 2009,
197–198). Books and television series set during the
Napoleonic wars have for years provided the British
with images of the French as their enemies. It is not
insignificant how historical culture depicts the past.
On the other hand, there is also no reason to underestimate the critical facilities of young people. They
seem to be able to recognise latent influences. However, the most vulnerable group of all is young children, whose critical abilities are undeveloped.
5. War as a Permanent Theme of Historical
Culture
As has been shown beforehand, a warlike historical
culture continues to flourish, especially among boys.
The channels mediating history have, of course,
partly changed. In place of comics and books, movies
and computer games are now the medium. The power
of war seemed to already be waning in the 1980s,
when war toys encountered resistance, for example
from the kindergartens and from department stores
10 For example, the best-selling games in February 2011 were Killzone 3 and Call of Duty Black Ops. Counter-Strike was, in turn,
the third best-selling game in Finland in 2010. Finnish Games
and Multimedia Association FIGMA.
45
Jukka Rantala
who refused to stock them. War comics were losing
their readership as well. Over the next decade, however, war was again pushed into the world of children
and young people through computer and console
games. Moreover, in television programmes war has
maintained a strong presence for many decades in
both Finland and the rest of the world.11
A consensus concerning the impact of a violent
culture has not been found among researchers. According to some, the harmful effects of such a culture have been exaggerated. They claim that people consider
games and movies to be fiction: in war games, the killing of the enemy is part of the process of clearing a
game field (Kutner, Olson 2008; Olson et al. 2008;
Cragg et al. 2007, 59–61; Ermi et al. 2004, 17–18). According to them, war films provide viewers with the
possibility of handling troubling feelings in a safe
context. This may be true with adults. For children,
however, the problem is, viewing age recommendations not being followed, meaning that children at
too young an age must deal with matters too frightening for them. (Cf. Newman et al. 2004, 70.)
The most harmful are historical culture products
which indoctrinate viewers, readers or players. The
younger the users are, the more difficult it is for them
to notice that the products contain hidden influences.
For example, some computer simulations are structured in such a way that the player learns to solve problems between nations through the use of war.
Negotiations and the pursuit of peace lead the player,
in such simulations, to defeat (Schut 2007, 221–222),
which begs the question: does this also teach the
players to more easily accept war in real life. Examinations of these cases are difficult, and as a result, the
subject has not been researched a great deal.
The studies concerning the perceptions of Finnish
children and young people have revealed that they
consider wars to be significant events in history. Wars
also inspire them. This is reflected in, among other
things, findings concerning the content of history teaching, in which young people elevate wars as the most
interesting content of the teaching. Older youths, 16
to 18 years old, have adopted their views on war from
the entertainment industry and not from school teaching. According to Sirkka Ahonen, in her interview
studies young people told her that they thought of
Corporal Antti Rokka, the fictional movie hero from
the film Unknown Soldier, as if he was actually a comrade of their own grandfathers. According to Ahonen
(2002, 70), the historical knowledge of young people
is a mix of both truth and fiction. Those under 10
years of age and living in a compact family environ-
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 41–49
ment, however, form their perceptions of the past
from the narratives of their parents and grandparents
rather than from popular entertainment.
What impact will warlike narratives of remembrance have on the children? Remembrance narratives concerning the Winter and Continuation Wars introduce
children to the essential building blocks of Finnish
identity. In addition to their own family and relatives,
the stories connect the children to the great national
narratives. In interviews with children aged 7–10
years, the interviewees invariably refer to Russia as
having been the enemy of Finland; they do not talk of
the Soviet Union. This is despite fact that Russia today does not for them seem to be an enemy. The
question arises of whether the anti-Russia sentiment
in Finland, which increases with age, is engendered
by the entertainment culture. Researchers have warned of an increase in anti-Russian sentiments in a warlike historical culture, although this issue has also
been difficult to study.
The strong presence of war in historical culture
may also have other side effects. It may negatively affect the future orientation of young people, for example. According to several studies, young Finns have
adopted pessimistic attitudes towards the future.
They are worried about increases in violence, and the
threat of war was particularly evident in the responses of boys (Seppänen 2008, 34; Rubin 1998). The visible presence of war in Finnish historical culture may
give young people the impression that, from time to
time, nations must ensure their independence
through war. Older adolescents are able to relate to
wars which are taking place around the world and
their potential impact on Finland, but the understanding of younger children to such events is still not very structured (cf. Toivonen 1991; Puhakainen 1992).
They may, for example, consider bomb attacks in the
Middle East to be a threat. Further, as a result of their
undeveloped understanding of time, children have
difficulty in relating to the time of what they hear and
see. Therefore historical wars, for example Finland’s
wars against the Soviet Union, may thus seem frightening merely by their close proximity.
In the public treatment of wars there also seem to
be positive effects. The survival of Finland in the wars
which were fought against the Soviet Union has increased young people’s faith in their own and their
nation’s future survival (Ahonen 1998). The wars
against the Soviet Union are intrinsic to the great national narratives, and these are used in building the
Finnish identity. The passing of the generation that
had experienced war has not reduced the prominence
11 For example, in the UK, almost a third of history programmes
since the 1960s have dealt with wars. (Hunt 2006, 847–848).
About the significance of movies in the formation of historical
consciousness see Wineburg et al. 2007, 67.
46
Jukka Rantala
of the wars in narratives, on the contrary. The traumatic wartime experiences of the previous generation,
which was unable to participate in narratives about
the war, are no longer repressed it that way. War is
openly talked about within family circles, along with
the connection of families to the great national narratives specifically through the Winter and Continua-
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 41–49
tion Wars (Rantala 2011). In addition, recent studies
show that war is more strongly present in the world
of young people today than in that of their own parents or grandparents during their adolescences. It
remains to be seen whether this will have an impact
on Finland’s statistics concerning violence.
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© JSSE 2011
ISSN 1618–5293
Bettina Lösch
The Political Dimension of Global Education:
Global Governance and Democracy1
Political and economic global transformation processes are encompassing the field of political education. The
subject matter of political education, namely the political, has itself undergone a radical transformation. The
changes have had a particular effect on democratic structures and opportunities for participation in the political process. Focusing on a conception of critical education for democracy, this article will highlight the democratic deficits of the globalisation process, and shed light on political-theoretical conceptions of global
governance. As opposed to the paradigmatic reorientation of political education into democratic and (European) citizenship education, which has taken place in Germany, the case will be put forward for political education for global democracy which goes beyond Eurocentric thinking and the concept of the nation state.
Global political education involves a broad conception of politics and incorporates the new democratisation
processes as well as the accompanying expanded forms of participation.
Die globalen Transformationsprozesse von Politik und Ökonomie erfassen auch die politischen Bildungsprozesse. Der Gegenstand der politischen Bildung: das Politische ist einem radikalen Wandel unterzogen. Die Veränderungen wirken sich insbesondere auf die demokratischen Strukturen und Partizipationsmöglichkeiten aus. Im
Fokus einer Konzeption kritischer Demokratiebildung werden in diesem Artikel die Demokratiedefizite des Globalisierungsprozesses sowie der politiktheoretischen Konzeptionen einer Global Governance beleuchtet. In
Kontrast zur paradigmatischen Neuausrichtung politischer Bildung in Deutschland als Demokratie-Pädagogik
und european citizenship education wird in diesem Beitrag für eine globale Perspektive politischer Bildung plädiert, die über ein nationalstaatliches und eurozentristisches Denken hinausweist. Eine globale politische Bildung legt einen weiten Begriff von Politik an und greift die Impulse neuer Demokratisierungsbewegungen sowie die damit einhergehenden erweiterten Partizipationsformen auf.
Keywords:
Global Education, political education, citizenship education, critical education for democracy, globalisation, global governance, democracy, participation
The dramatic upheavals and crises of our age, which
are commonly denoted by the term globalisation, are
affecting both the institutional framework and the
content of education in general, as well as political
education in particular. Both education and political
education are tasked with shedding light on global
transformation processes. At the same time, educational processes and political education itself are
being affected not only by global political and economic changes, but also the accompanying erosion of
democracy (Butterwegge, Hentges 2002, 8; Lösch
2011a). Political education in Germany, which is the
subject of this article, has not only been affected by
drastic public spending cuts – its own field of knowledge is also changing the processes of the formation
of political opinions and consensus, political participation and political decision making. Through the
processes of globalisation and Europeanisation,
politics is being shifted onto more and more levels –
new political actors are appearing, and in general an
1
The article presents a re-worked English version of the article:
Lösch, Bettina. 2008. Governance globale e democrazia. In: Fiaschi, Giovanni, ed. Governance: Oltro lo Stato? Soveria Manelli:
Rubbettino, 281–295.
acceleration of political processes can be observed
(Lösch 2011a).
In the field of political pedagogy and political education in Germany, up until now there have been only
a few conceptual and theoretical studies which deal
with the topic of globalisation (see Steffens 2010; e.g.
Overwien, Rathenow 2009a; Steffens 2007). There was
a similar problem for business pedagogy and economic education, especially in the late 1990s (see Hedtke 2002). By contrast, there have been important
contributions in pedagogical approaches to global
learning (see e.g. Adick 2002; Scheunpflug, Hirsch
2000; Scheunpflug, Schröck 2000; Seitz 2002a, 2002b;
Selby 2000; Selby, Rathenow 2003; Steffens, Weiß
2004). Political didactics and political education are
currently opening themselves up to a European and
global perspective by means of a conceptual reorientation (For a critique of European citizenship education see Lösch 2009; for the English debate see e.g.
Davies, Evans, Reid 2005). With regard to pedagogical
approaches to global learning and the current conceptions of European citizenship education, not only
should the individual and pedagogical dimensions of
the subjects be focused on, but the political dimension
of the structural context of the globalisation process
should also be included.
The global political and socio-economic changes
are mainly affecting the long-established, and
hard-won democratic structures and opportunities
for participation in the political process. For a long ti-
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Bettina Lösch
The Political Dimension of Global Education: Global Governance and Democracy
me the nation state was the framework for the democratic structures and procedures. With all its
accompanying difficulties and exclusion mechanisms
(Lösch 2011b), the concept of citizenship ought to nevertheless enable democratic participation. By means
of the transformation of the nation state and the devolvement of national sovereignty to supranational
entities such as the European Union, the structural
and social conditions of democracy are changing. Political education is thereby also losing its framework
of reference of the nation state. Conceptions of global governance aim to analyse these shifts in the
structures of government, power, and representative
participation.
This article will, on the one hand, elucidate the pedagogical concepts of global education with regard
to the political and democratic aspects. On the other
hand, it will elaborate on the challenges for democracy in the process of globalisation. The paper argues
that the pedagogical concepts should take these challenges into account in a more profound way. For this
purpose it suggests a concept of critical education for
democracy. The first section expounds on the pedagogical approaches to global learning (1.). Then the
political dimension of global learning will be examined, and the question as to what role a critical education for democracy could play in global education will
be assessed (2.). Sections (3.) and (4.) give a brief
overview of the theoretical debate about globalisation, global governance and democracy and highlight
some of the democratic deficits of global governance
that political education should reflect upon. In the final summary, a political education for global democracy and participation (5.) will be advocated that
builds on concepts of global education and combines
them with a more thorough analysis of the global political transformations and their democratic impacts.
1. Pedagogical Approaches: Global
Education and Education for Sustainable
Development
In educational science in Germany there are currently
two concepts dealing with the theme of globalisation
which have become established, and which aim to be
incorporated into education, school and teaching: on
the one hand, the concept of education for sustainable
development (ESD) (see e.g. de Haan 2004; Brodowski et
al. 2009; Overwien, Rathenow 2009a; Riss, Overwien
2010); and, on the other hand, global learning (see
e.g. Adick 2002; Scheunpflug, Hirsch 2000;
Scheunpflug, Schröck 2000; Seitz 2002a, 2002b; Selby
2000; Selby, Rathenow 2003; Overwien, Rathenow
2009b). Following the publication of the Orientierungsrahmen für den Lernbereich Globale Entwicklung (Framework for the Teaching of Global Development) (BMZ, KMK
2007), both concepts have been incorporated into syllabuses, teacher training, and text books.
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 50–58
The first concept goes back to the UNESCO initiative which called for a UN decade of Education for Sustainable Development in 2004. The nation states have
been given the opportunity to introduce educational
measures which result in the integration of the topic
of sustainability into schools and teaching by 2014.
The countries have been requested to ensure that these measures are brought to life. However, due to the
federal structure in Germany, these measures have
been implemented in very different ways in the German federal states (Overwien, Rathenow 2009a, 14f.).
Important events in the international debate on
environmental issues and the concept of sustainability include the UN Environment and Development
summits of the 1990s and the Agenda 21 process
which began in Rio de Janeiro (the UN Conference on
the Environment and Development in 1992 in Rio de
Janeiro; the World Summit on Sustainable Development
2002 in Johannesburg). The issue of sustainability is
currently debated against the backdrop of climate
change and the scarcity of resources. As early as the
1970s, the Club of Rome drew attention to the issue of
limited raw materials – however, it was not until the
1990s that world-wide measures were introduced
with the Agenda 21 process. The current situation is
rather sobering. The UN summit in Copenhagen in
December 2009 (United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change – UNFCCC) revealed for example
how international agreements collapse due to the politics of national interest (Wissen 2010). Thus, education for sustainable development has the difficult task
of not only identifying the progressive trends and the
actors in the politics of the environment, but also tackling the issue of set-backs and areas of conflict.
The concept of global learning emerged from the
tradition of political education for development, and
includes issues such as environmental and peace education, and human rights and intercultural education.
While earlier conceptions of political education for development focused on the living conditions of the
countries in the global south, current conceptions of
global learning try to illustrate and analyse the relationships and dependencies between the global
north and south, and thereby overcome a Eurocentric
world perspective (Humpert 2009, 244). Thus, global
learning not only provides an umbrella for different
educational sub-disciplines, but also undertakes a different perspective in terms of content.
Initially the pedagogical practice of global learning developed outside schools – it was linked to the
activities of churches, non-governmental organisations, organisations for development cooperation, and
solidarity initiatives (Overwien, Rathenow 2009a, 16).
Many different types of learning materials were developed for both youth and adult education. Increasingly global learning is finding its way into schools (see
the survey by VENRO 2010); however, this is taking
51
Bettina Lösch
place in a rather haphazard manner. It is mainly motivated teachers who are introducing this topic into the
classroom, or are effecting a globally aware and ecologically sustainable organisation of the school. The recommendation by the KMK (Standing Conference of
Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Regions of the Federal Republic of Germany) in 1997
(Eine Welt/Dritte Welt in Unterricht und Schule: One
World/The Third World in Teaching and School) led to
a systematic positioning of the topics into the curricula of individual regions. As has already been mentioned, the publication of the Framework for the
Teaching of Global Development (BMZ, KMK 2007) was
a further important step towards integrating a global
perspective into daily school life and teaching.
2. The Political Dimension of Global
Education and Critical Education for
Democracy
In Germany it is thanks to the pedagogical concepts
of global learning and education for sustainable development that the theme of globalisation has been
incorporated into the education system, schools, and
teaching practices, albeit in a rudimentary way. However, the pedagogical concepts often lack a political dimension, as the political scientist Nicola Humpert
asserts: “Although global learning confronts highly
political questions, it still remains apolitical in that it
describes phenomena instead of analysing them”
(Humpert 2009, 245; translation by the author BL).
Humpert argues, for example, that it does not suffice
to discuss the topic of fair trade in the classroom from
a viewpoint of personal responsibility of individuals
and their consumer sovereignty. Much more exciting
and urgent would be, for example, the question
“what needs to be done in order for fair trade to no
longer be necessary” (ibid.).
If one accepts Humpert’s assessment with respect
to the political dimension of global learning, then first
of all it is necessary to engender an understanding of
global political processes, “how and why decisions are
made at an international level, and secondly what opportunities there are to influence these decisions”
(Humpert 2009, 247; translation by the author BL). Issues such as global trade, human rights or climate
change should be linked to questions of political procedure, political decision-making, and the exercising
of political influence. Global learning should
“examine topics such as the national, bilateral and
multilateral power and decision-making processes in
formal and informal types of organisations, thereby
making these processes clear and comprehensible”
(ibid.).
Analysing socio-political structures is the task of
the social sciences, which examine the political, sociological, economic and cultural dimensions of globalisation in an interdisciplinary way. Incorporating a
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 50–58
global perspective promotes interdisciplinary thinking more than ever before. With regard to this, one
could follow the suggestion by Reinhold Hedtke to
form political education into an interdisciplinary subject within the social sciences (Hedtke 2006, 2007). On
the one hand, the individual sub-disciplines of global
learning would be brought together, since, for example, not every project which is aimed at protecting the
environment is also socially responsible. In particular,
the connections and contradictions between ecology
and economics must be assessed. On the other hand,
it is important to prevent the current competition between political and economic education, and their tendency to drift apart (Steffens, Widmaier 2008), and
also to strengthen other related disciplines such as sociology, philosophy and geography.
The pedagogical conceptions of global learning
are not, however, lacking a socio-theoretical basis.
Above all, Klaus Seitz’s theory can lay claim to providing a socio-theoretical basis of global learning (Seitz
2002a). Indeed, the analysis of causes and paradigms
of globalisation which are discussed within the mainstream of the social sciences are often drawn upon.
From the viewpoint of political education, however,
the principle of controversy is not always appropriately taken into account. The principle of controversy indicates that theories and approaches which are
discussed within academia should also be incorporated into teaching. However, if only theories within
the academic mainstream are drawn upon, i.e. those
which attract the most attention, and which may well
reach the feuilleton sections of the serious press publications, then other analyses which have not achieved great popularity, but which nevertheless may
aptly describe societal development, will be lacking.
In the conceptions of global learning the new political rules of global governance, for example, or the
normative demand of good governance have been affirmatively adopted, even though within political
science there is disagreement about the democratic
deficits of these approaches to new types of governance. The assumptions about the role and influence
of national government policy are also problematic.
In global learning, as well as in some political-didactical approaches, the analysis of the ‘post-national
constellation’ (1998) which was put forward by Jürgen Habermas in the 1990s is often drawn upon. Within the social sciences, the transformation of the
nation state and democracy is interpreted and analysed in very different ways.
While Habermas assumed the loss of importance
of national governments, and underestimated the politics of national interest and the exertion of influence in global and European political conflicts,
other analyses from the field of political science now
credit the (nation) state with a more active and endu-
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Bettina Lösch
ring political role in international processes (see e.g.
Brand 2007).
This is where the conception of critical education
for democracy can be applied within a global context
(Lösch 2010). In contrast to the established conceptions of democratic pedagogy in Germany, which are
based on a normative concept of democracy, and describe democracy as an ideal, a critical education for
democracy also analyses the processes of de-democratisation and the deconstruction of democracy.
Alongside a critical analysis of and a reflection on the
global political and economic transformation processes, a critical education for democracy also examines the opportunities for intervention and action of
the subjects. A critical education for democracy seeks
to deal with the issue of the opportunities for participation as well as the exclusion mechanisms of democracy and politics.
Such a critical approach should bring in the controversial debates of the socio-political sciences, especially with regard to the transformation of democracy
and the welfare state, in order to stimulate the discussion about global education. It can extend the pedagogical approaches of global learning using aspects
of the theory of democracy and put forward questions such as: how are democratic structures, procedures and institutions changing within the global
transformation process? What forms of de-democratisation can be observed, what demands for democratisation are made, and what democratic practices are
becoming accepted?
Therefore, the next section will reflect on the socio-political discussion with regard to globalisation
and global governance. Above all, attention will be given to the democratic deficits of global political and
economic transformation processes, since this is central to democratic education within a global perspective.
3. Gobalisation, Global Governance and
Democracy
In the 1990s there was widespread discussion about
a new world order after the tearing down of the Berlin
wall and the fall of the communist states. Whereas in
the mid 1970s over two-thirds of all states could reasonably be called authoritarian (Held 1997, 1), this
percentage has fallen dramatically. The number of
democracies is now growing steadily – if we understand democracy as a formal organisation of a political community where free elections can be held and
2
It is true that the number of states in the world which can be labelled as democratic is increasing. However, regimes can also
label themselves as democratic when in fact they only provide
the minimum of formal democratic processes, such as holding
elections without there being true freedom of opinion, or without other fundamental political rights being guaranteed.
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 50–58
where a minimum standard of political rights is respected.2 Some neo-conservative political advisers,
such as Francis Fukuyama, even proclaimed after the
crisis of 1989/90, the “triumph of liberal democracy,”
and along with this the “end of history” (Fukuyama
1992).
The 1990s can also be seen as the era of important
United Nations (UN) Conferences, where many people
– not only members of government – came together
to deliberate about ecological problems, world-wide
poverty or questions of gender and human rights.
New actors such as non-governmental-organisations
(NGOs) participated in this world-wide process. Politics was perceived not only as a governmental issue
but also as the concern of civil society. The United Nations emerged as a workshop for new forms of global
governance – global governance meaning politics
which deals with global problems that go beyond the
borders of nation states and affect people all over the
world. The process of globalisation has led to a transformation of the state. This process is based above all
on the globalisation of trade and financial transactions as well as the new phenomena of modern communication networks and information technology.
For a while in the 1990s, commentators were talking
about the end of the nation state or a “post-national
constellation” (Habermas 1998). Others have analysed
the new function or role of the state: thus the concept
of global governance emerged (Messner, Nuscheler
1996; Brand et al 2000; Brunnengräber et al. 2004;
Brand, Scherrer 2005; Behrens 2005).
Governance means turning away from dirigiste
forms of policy-making and traditional top-down approaches (Benz 2004; Blumenthal 2005). Theorists
such as James Rosenau have used the term global governance to denote the regulation of interdependent
relations in the absence of an overarching political authority or world government (Rosenau, Czempiel
1992). Global governance is used to signify the transformation of politics from a hierarchical, state-based
order to dynamic, multi-level networks. The term
points towards the emerging structure of an international system beyond Westphalia. (The term Westphalian order refers to the establishing of nation
states in Europe. It characterises a system of sovereignty of states, legal equality of states and non-intervention in the international affairs of one state by
another, as originally embodied in the Peace of Westphalia, 1648). The new architecture of institutions, rules and procedures as well as the cooperation
between governmental and non-governmental actors
on an international level indicates a new mode of political and social order.
In an increasingly globalised and interconnected
world nation states depend more and more on the decisions of international organisations and agreements. New forms of political organisation and
53
Bettina Lösch
regulation have emerged as a result of the growing interaction of foreign and domestic policy and the desire of most states for forms of international
governance and regulation to deal with collective policy problems. This development can be illustrated by
the following:
1. New forms of multilateral and multinational
politics have been established, and with them different styles and processes of collective decisionmaking. Alongside the UN, which is weak in many
respects, other international governmental organisations (IGOs) are very powerful. There are organisations which at first glance mainly have an
economic function, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank or the World
Trade Organisation (WTO). In fact they are political actors, which strongly influence international
politics.
2. Apart from the national governments, new political and private actors are participating in this new
process of decision-making: for example, not only
international governmental and non-governmental
organisations but also wide varieties of transnational pressure and lobby groups like the International Chamber of Commerce, the Institute of
International Finance, or the European Roundtable
of Industrialists.
3. A further important point is that the relation between political and economic power is shifting.
Economic power is no longer regulated within the
context of a nation state. For example: Multinational corporations (MNCs) can respond to variations in interest rates by raising finance in
whichever capital market is most favourable; they
can shift their demand for employment to countries with much lower employment costs; they can
move their activities to where the maximum benefits accrue. As a result, the autonomy and the decision making power of democratically elected
governments has been constrained by sources of
unelected and unrepresentative economic power
(Held 1997, 7). The increase in economic power of
the Multinationals has also caused fundamental
changes in our value systems. Instead of democratic values or principles such as participation,
emancipation and so on, economic criteria such as
effectiveness and efficiency have greater dominance.
4. Finally, new military conflicts and new geostrategic politics contribute to global instability
and have motivated calls for a new era of world
order.
In contrast to what had been hoped in the 1990s,
world politics did not undergo a change that resulted
in greater democracy and peace. Aims of the global
civil society such as finding solutions for ecological
problems, supporting sustainable development and
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 50–58
reducing or abolishing poverty seem even less attainable than in past years. While the decade of the 1990s
was marked by enthusiasm generated by the UN
World Conferences, the perception that significant
progress was being achieved has today been replaced
by a sense of disappointment.
4. The Democratic Deficits of Global
Governance
In the context of globalisation, democracies have to
deal with various problems even at a national level
(Schmalz-Bruns 2005). Some academics are already
speaking about a crisis of representative democracy
or a period of “post-democracy” (Crouch 2004). This
relates to a political community in which elections are
held, but where election campaigns have become nothing more than huge spectacles where competing PR
teams control the public debate and influence it by
means of their campaigns. We can also observe a certain loss of confidence in political representatives. No
one really knows who is responsible for specific political decisions and where the centre of power really
lies. It is not clear what role the national parliaments
still have. Are they a place of proper political debate
and deliberation or just a place where decisions are
rubber stamped? Democracy seems to be located nowhere. As a result we are faced with problems of how
to politically organise our society.
The global transformation of politics indicates a
loss of democracy not only on a domestic but also on
a global level (Benz, Papadopoulos 2006). These challenges for democracy in a globalised world could be
summarised as follows: (1) The Internationalisation of
politics: With the internationalisation of politics and
the accompanying transformation of the state, democratic institutions and the democratic process are fundamentally changing. Democracy is no longer located
within the boundaries of a single nation state. In a
complex interconnected world the idea of democracy
can no longer be simply defended as an idea attributable to a particular closed political community or nation state. Deliberative and decision making centres
go beyond national territories. The internationalisation of politics has seen a shift in decision making onto an international level, and the associated loss of
democratic control in the traditional democratic institutions such as parliaments. (2) The Informalisation of
politics: As a result, the new types of policy making
are mostly informal and opaque. New networks and
actors are often uncoupled from the official representative bodies. Policy making is increasingly influenced by private interests and has lost its public
character. The decision making process is not transparent and lacks legitimacy.
Some people still think of global governance as
global government, because the domestic analogy is
so familiar. However, on a global level there exists nei-
54
Bettina Lösch
ther a monopoly of power, nor democratic institutions which would be able to control a world
government. Even the European Union, which is based on the institutionalisation of a specific political
system, cannot be compared with the structures of a
nation state. Whether the particular political system
of the EU can be seen as a system of governance is a
controversial subject. Some say the institutional framework of the EU is closer to the model of network
governance than to the classical model of government (Benz 2004, 125ff.).
Democracy requires a demos which does not exist
on an international level – a demos in whose name
governance could take place. Therefore, democratic
governance beyond the nation state faces serious problems. In order to solve these problems, theorists of
global governance look for new actors within a global
civil society. But, who are these new actors? Are they
able to constitute a transnational public sphere where
policy-makers are induced to give reasons for their options and where deliberation can take place? Are they
a source of legitimacy and counteractive power? Over
and above that, if all the actors participate in the political process who holds the political power, and who
is holding this power to account? The main problem
of transnational or global governance concerns the
lack of congruence between those who are being governed and those to whom the governing bodies are
accountable. Mechanisms to enhance democratic legitimacy cannot simply be transposed from the domestic level onto the international level (Risse 2006, 180).
A brief overview of the function of these new political actors will illustrate some problems of democracy on a global level:
1. States: States continue to be key actors in world
politics, although it is no longer reasonable to
think of world politics simply as politics among
states. A large variety of other organisations exercise authority and engage in political decision
making all over the world. However, states create
IGOs and determine what actions they can or cannot take (Karns, Mingst 2004, 16). Many states
have a privileged position in IGOs such as the IMF,
the World Bank or the WTO, because they founded
them, constitute their membership, monopolise
voting rights, and provide financial support. Of
course, states cannot monopolise all the institutions of global governance, but certain states
are very powerful. For example: although Article 1
of the UN Charter says that the people of the
world should hold the democratic sovereignty, the
national states and governments control the agreements and make the important decisions. Much
worse than the UN voting system is the distribution of power in IGOs such as the WTO or the
IMF. These IGOs depend on the power of the
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 50–58
highly industrialised countries of the global north
which have the majority of votes.
2. IGOs: Although international governmental organisations are based on national governments,
they have developed their own administrative systems and therefore a life of their own. As well as
the nation states they serve as key actors or agents
in global governance, and they have the power to
induce states to act. Some individuals such as the
president of the World Bank and the executive director of the IMF form a powerful global elite.
3. NGOs: NGOs come in such a variety of forms, with
such a variety of emphases that it is difficult to
generalise about them. The growth of NGOs and
NGO networks in the 1990s has been a major factor in their increasing involvement in governance
at all levels. The majority are not part of formal
networks, but may have informal links, for
example, to large international human rights or environmental organisations (Karns, Mingst 2004,
17). Most of the NGOs – in particular those which
are small and not well organised – have little voice
in global politics. NGOs tend to become involved
when it is a question of avoiding conflict or acquiring information. They are mainly seen as a source
of legitimacy although it is sometimes unclear
whom they represent, and some are very single
issue orientated.
4. MNCs: In contrast to NGOs, the Multinationals are
profit-orientated and their huge financial capital is
one of the reasons why they are much more powerful than other actors, and why they are able to influence world politics to their advantage. Since the
1970s, MNCs have been increasingly recognised as
significant international actors, controlling resources far greater than those of many states. As
actors in global governance, MNCs have profoundly altered the structure of the global economy and how it functions. By choosing where to
invest or not to invest, MNCs shape the economic
development opportunities of countries and entire
regions.
Concepts of global governance sometimes neglect
the differences between the new political actors, as
has been highlighted above. For example, some actors are more powerful than others and they have different opportunities to exercise power or to
participate in the political process. The underlying
reason could be that theorists of global governance
focus mainly on the transformation or the new functions of the state, and not on the democratic modifications within the process of globalisation. This leads
to the disregarding of the inequality between the actors as well as the necessity of the public character of
politics. The new forms of decision making within
global governance are often located in non-public forums and the actors, such as public-private partner-
55
Bettina Lösch
ships, are not elected or legitimated by a public. The
informalisation of politics has been accompanied by
the privatisation of politics and a loss of a public
sphere. Theorists of global governance tend to think
about democracy in categories of input and output
legitimacy (Scharpf 1999; Risse 2006, 191). If there is
a problem with input legitimacy, that is the possibility of participation within politics, they think it is
necessary to focus on the output legitimacy, which is
to improve the communication of political decisions
made by political actors to the people. The main criterion for output legitimacy is not participation or
the equality of participation, but the efficiency of
problem solving (Scharpf 1999, 16ff.). Therefore, global governance often goes along with a concept of
weak democracy – and not that of a more demanding
participatory democracy, such as that which advocates of deliberative democracy have put forward
(Lösch 2005). It is clear that global democracy cannot
be organised in the same way as representative
democracy within the nation state. However, given
that democracy depends on the participation of
people, it needs to be located not in informal arrangements among various actors but in public forums
which guarantee transparency, legitimacy and a process of deliberation.
5. Summary
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 50–58
From these observations on democratic theory and
global governance, central aspects for global learning
and political education can be ascertained: on the one
hand, the fields of global learning such as development and peace education, as well as intercultural
and human rights education should be supplemented
by the political dimension and the aspect of democratic questioning. This relates to an area of political
education which I have termed critical education for
democracy. A critical education for democracy examines problem-oriented structural, global, political, and
socio-economic relationships, i.e. new political actors,
forms of politics, participation and decision-making
procedures, as well as the processes of the dedemocratisation and democratisation.
On the other hand, global learning opens up a socio-global perspective for political education. This
change in perspective makes it possible to go beyond
the concepts of nationalism and Eurocentric thinking
which are still widespread within political education
today. Political education for global democracy and
participation also reach beyond theories of identity
which are based on European citizenship education
(Lösch 2009). This change in political education,
which is distanced from a narrow political understanding as well as a nation-state oriented approach, will
possibly contribute to efforts for global democratisation.
56
Bettina Lösch
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 50–58
A critical education therefore builds on concepts
of global learning and combines them with a more
thorough analysis of the global political transformations and their democratic impact.
Butterwegge, Christoph; Hentges, Gudrun, eds. 2002. Politische Bildung und Globalisierung. Opladen: Leske und Budrich.
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© JSSE 2011
ISSN 1618–5293
Reviewer: Dominik Allenspach
Review of the Book:
”Kritische Bürger. Gefahr oder Ressource für die Demokratie?”
(“Critical Citizens: Risk or Resource for a Democracy?”)
written by Brigitte Geissel
According to the theory of political system support, a
political system and a democracy need the support of
its members to persist. Critique towards the political
system (political critique) is, therefore, seen as a
threat to democracies. However, in the nineteennineties many scholars have abandoned this paradigm and have adopted the idea that political
critique is a resource for democracies since critique
can help to refine the political system. In summary,
democracies need political support as well as political
critique. Is this a contradiction? In her book “Kritische Bürger. Gefahr oder Ressource für die Demokratie?,” Brigitte Geissel intends to untangle the two
concepts: the concept of political support and the
concept of political critique.
In the first chapter, the author rightly criticizes
that political dissatisfaction has been used as an ambiguous proxy variable for political critique. Political dissatisfaction could be understood as a healthy
inclination to question the political system, but also
as a depressed withdrawal from the political system.
Geissel suggests that in addition to the concept of political dissatisfaction the concept of political attentiveness should be included into the concept of political
critique. According to Geissel, political attentiveness
consists of the willingness to monitor the political
process and of the willingness to intervene into the
political process when considered necessary by the citizens. Unfortunately, she does not show how these
two civic duties are correlated, although she merges
them into the concept of political attentiveness.
By crossing the two concepts − political dissatisfaction and political attentiveness, Geissel classifies four
types of critical citizens: 1) attentive-satisfied, 2) attentive-dissatisfied, 3) inattentive-satisfied, and 4) inattentive-dissatisfied. Although she develops this typology,
she does not describe explicitly how the two dimensions are related on a theoretical basis. At the implicit
level, however, Geissel hypothesizes that citizens get
involved in the political process as long as they are
politically attentive, regardless of their degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. In contrast, politically inattentive citizens withdraw from the political process,
regardless of their degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
In the second chapter, Geissel examines the causes of political dissatisfaction and political attentive-
ness. Whereas political satisfaction is explained by the
economic and democratic performance of the political system, political attentiveness is not explained by
socio-demographic or by contextual variables. She
concludes that political attentiveness is an independent core belief. Does this mean that individuals are
born either as politically attentive or inattentive citizens? From the perspective of political sociology, this
may be doubted. Considering Geissels’ estimations,
one must rather conclude that her models are insufficiently specified to explain political attentiveness.
In the third chapter, Geissel uses three steps to
examine which of the four types of citizens can be
considered “resources” or “threats” for democracies.
First, after reviewing the literature, she summarizes
the attributes which are considered as resources for
democracies (such as political participation, political
interest, etc.). Second, to examine whether there exist
interaction effects, she correlates the four types of critical citizens with these democracy attributes. Third,
using multivariate regression models, she examines
whether the effects of political attentiveness and political dissatisfaction on these democracy attributes
remain stable taking into account several control variables. Geissel reveals that politically attentive citizens have attributes that are beneficial for
democracies, independently of their degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. In contrast, the politically
inattentive citizens seldom have beneficial attributes.
Furthermore, Geissel demonstrates that the effect of
political attentiveness on democracy attributes remains stable taking into account several control variables. From a methodological viewpoint, this
three-step approach, especially the construction of a
typology to examine interaction effects, is interesting. However, if traditional interaction effects had
been estimated more in depth results could have
been generated.
In the fourth chapter, Geissel examines whether
an entity with many critical citizens is more democratic than an entity with few critical citizens. The author reveals that there is a positive relation between
an entity with many critical citizens and the democratic level of the entity.
Based on these results, Geissel concludes in her
fifth and sixth chapter that politically attentive citizens are a resource for democracies and she suggests
59
Reviewer: Dominik Allenspach
Review of the Book: ”Kritische Bürger. Gefahr oder Ressource für die Demokratie?”
that political attentiveness should be introduced into
civic education.
Brigitte Geissel is one of the first researchers who
intend to untangle the relation between political dissatisfaction and political critique by introducing the
concept of political attentiveness. Even though her attempt to examine every aspect of political critique is
commendable it also entails some inaccuracies. She
gains, however, some new and interesting insights
which advance the research on political critique.
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 59–60
Geissel, Brigitte. 2011. Kritische Bürger. Gefahr oder Ressource für die Demokratie? (Critical Citizens: Risk or Resource for a Democracy? Frankfurt
60
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 61–67
© JSSE 2011
ISSN 1618–5293
Oyeleke Oluniyi
Country Report:
Citizenship Education and Curriculum Development in Nigeria
The article highlights the evolutionary trends of citizenship education in Nigeria. The 1914 British amalgamation of erstwhile Northern and Southern Protectorates gave birth to Nigeria as a state. The disparage ethnic
composition of the new state, especially after independence, necessitated finding a common ground to promote committed citizens, against primordial ethnic cleavages and indigenization. It is not therefore surprising
that the role of education in fostering national citizenship and consciousness was emphasized.
Initially, social studies was used as a curriculum framework, until lately when a new subject, civics, was
created in primary and junior secondary schools. The author considers the historical, cultural and political context underlining these curricular changes and identifies the current and future challenges face by the implementation of Civics curricular in Nigerian schools.
Keywords:
curriculum, citizenship, civics, social studies
Introduction
The conception of democracy in the ancient Greek
city state of Athens and the manner it was practiced,
with exclusion of certain segment of society namely
women, slaves, aliens and peasants -has inspired the
notion of citizenship may be far beyond the intention
of the ancient Athenians. Historically, Athens left a
legacy of democracy and citizenship to the modern
world. With the decline of ancient Athens and the rise
of Roman Empire, the concept of citizenship assumed
wider focus and state decline was attributed to bad
citizenship. In the modern age, the complexities of
interests within nation-state, high crime rate, civilization, terrorism and failed state phenomenon, make
citizenship education an imperative. Without any
sense of contradiction, citizens need to be educated
and be informed about the governing process, the
rights they are to demand from the state and the responsibility required of them. Both the state and the
citizens should fulfill their part of the social contract.
Dustin (1999) put it clearly while articulating the
works of J. J Rousseau on the imperative of citizenship education. He affirmed that:
“there can be no patriotism without liberty, no liberty
without virtue, no virtue without citizens; create citizens, and you have everything you need; without them
you have nothing but debased slaves, from the rulers of
the state downwards. To form citizens is not the work of
a day, and in order to have men (sic!) it is necessary to
educate them when they are children.” (Dustin, 1999, 7).
The wave of democratization across the globe contributed to the spreading of citizenship especially in
Africa, where such idea was termed foreign and
exotic. African lived pure communal life, and as such
the concept of indigenization was widely embraced.
Citizenship, like capitalism and liberalization was a by
product of democracy. With Nigeria obtaining political independence from Britain in 1960, the drive
towards attainment of nationhood and democratization, the notion of citizenship rights became more
pronounced. The awareness of being a separate sovereign nation as opposed to being a British colony
stimulated defining a new identity. In this article, I
attempt to trace the challenge of the Nigeria nation
and the official response to use school and its curriculum to achieve the educational goals which, undoubtedly, derived from national goals. What are the
views of the Nigerian scholars on the concept of citizenship education?
Ozumba and Eteng (1999, 25) explained citizenship education as the “totality of learning, instruction,
equipping, which citizens need to be able to play
his/her role, discharge his/her responsibilities, know
his/her rights, understand his/her country-the constitution, the polities, the ethics, the religious, the ethos
and the ideals that make the national geo-political entity”. Fadeiye (1995) opines that citizenship education is the kind of education given to the citizens of a
country with a view to making them responsible people, capable of contributing meaningfully, to the overall development of their country. Citizenship
education is then designed to make learners identify
and exercise their civic and political rights and also
willingly accept to perform their civic and political
responsibilities. But these assumptions must take into account the specificities of Nigeria’s historical, cultural and political context.
1. The Institution of Nigeria and the Goals
of Citizenship Education
Nigeria is made up of disparate ethnic nationalities
with diverse values and cultural inclination. There are
about 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria. Before the advent
of colonialism, these groups were administered under
a differing administrative system: in the North, the
predominant Hausa/Fulani operated a centralized
Emirate system headed by Emir; in the Yoruba dominated Western region, the monarchical system of government combined with some elements of liberal
republicanism was being operated - Oba had no ab-
61
Oyeleke Oluniyi
Country Report: Citizenship Education and Curriculum Development in Nigeria
solute power, but customarily checked by kingmakers
who are replica of modern legislators. In the Eastern
region, the administrative system was acephalous,
there were no visible traditional rulers but a variation
of republicanism. The concept of indigenization was a
dominant force as against citizenship. The resultant
effect was primordial cleavages to ethnic cause and
aspirations even after 1914 amalgamation of erstwhile
Northern and Southern protectorates, and even till
post independent Nigeria. The historical events had a
profound influence on nationalism and attainment of
real nationhood and citizenship. A Yoruba man, for instance, most likely primarily own allegiance to Yoruba cause before national consideration. The same
attitude manifests among other ethnic groups. This
makes the concept of citizenship blurred, fluid imagined rather reality.
British policy did not help the situation either. The
policy of divide and rule perpetually created a division between the north and south. The Land and Native Rights Ordinance of 1910 promoted segregation
and threat to nationhood. The Ordinance discouraged
free migration of southerners to the north. The Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA)
(2000, 57) observed that-,
“those citizens who are indigenous of other state are
less favoured. The least privileged are those citizens
who are unable to prove that they belong to a community indigenous to any sate in Nigeria, and women who
married to men from states other than their own. Such
multiple system of citizenship inevitably endangers discrimination in jobs, land purchases, housing, admission
to education institutions, marriages, business transactions and the distribution of social welfare”.
Many scholars have adduced ideal focal point of citizenship education in Nigeria. The nature of curriculum content vis a vis the recipients was a major
concern shortly after independence in October 1st
1960. The initial school curriculum was heavily dominated by the influence of the colonial master-Britain
and largely tailored towards Western aspirations. In
Nigeria, it was a prominent feature for a child to be
well acquainted with events outside the shore of
Nigeria, while extremely novice about what obtains
in his/her immediate environment. This is partly due
to enormous British influence on Nigeria education
system (Fafunwa, 1974; Makinde, 1979). It is logical
that a child that is deficient in the knowledge of
events in his/her surroundings has an uphill task of
learning to be good citizen of that society. Fafunwa
(1974) describe the products of colonial education as
though African in colour, but British in intellect and
outlook. To restructure the curriculum towards underlining Nigerian cultural values and aspirations, irrespective of the curriculum framework and definite
career subject was a major focus after the independence. The belief among some scholars is that such an
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 61–67
educational design aim at serving national interest is
perceived as a form of citizenship education (Fafunwa, 1974; Yusuf, 1985).
Additionally, multiculturalism is a prominent feature of Nigerian society and it is sad to note that it
has resulted into a perennial problem of sort. Centrifugal nationalism is a prominent feature of political
actors. As earlier stated, Nigeria is made up of about
250 ethnic groups with diverse culture, religion and
values system. The rate of religious and ethnic conflict is alarming. The political crises of 1960s has ethnic and religious undertone. The crises culminated
into a civil war between 1967 and 1970. Other examples of ethno-religious conflict include Kasuwan Magani conflicts in 1980, Kafanchan crisis of 1987, Zango
Kataf in 1984 and 1992, Tafawa Balewa crisis in 1991,
etc. Political rivalry among ethic groups has also led
to the series of crises such as Kano riots in 1953, Tivs
uprising in 1964, Western crisis in 1952, Ogoni rights
movement in 1990s, etc. In response to this, some
scholars have argued that school curriculum must be
redesigned to promote national unity, religious tolerance, socio-political and cultural integration
(Awosolu, 1993; Metziebi, Domite, Osakwe, 1996).
They argued that citizenship should not “define nationality in terms of ethnic, religious and cultural identity.” The argument goes further that the teaching of
citizenship education should foster the spirit of nationalism rather than ethnocentrism and individualistic
tendencies. In reference to Daverger, Agi (1999)- declared that the potentials to making citizens aware of
the need to diminish divisive antagonism and promote material links that unite people, and the development of a sense of community among ethnic
nationalism that constitute a state are two major
functions of citizenship education.
Another area of concern is values orientation and
inculcation. This aspect is clearly reflected in the new
Civics curriculum for primary and junior secondary
schools. Baike (2000) observed that, for curriculum to
promote the ideal of democracy, the focus should not
be limited to the development of intellect but also
“development of character and respect for constituted authority.” This school of thought argued for the
inculcation of African traditional values such as honesty, communalism which is a core aspect of active
citizenship, togetherness, integrated family system,
mutual and cooperative efforts, respect for elder and
constituted authority, and loyalty to a collective cause. Obike (1993) stressed that citizenship education
should teach attitude and values that will foster the
ideal of democratic practices, national consciousness
and patriotism. He submitted that, people’s values
orientation explains their attitude and action, and determines services rendered to fellow citizens. Yusuf
(2005) noted that value education is an integral part
of citizenship education. Bearing in mind that values
62
Oyeleke Oluniyi
system determines actions and shapes individual direction, the promotion of values in the citizens will
inspire nation-building. Conversely, citizenship education which trains ‘good’ citizens (i.e., citizens who are
aware of the human and political issues at stake in
their society or nation) requires from each citizen
ethical and moral qualities. According to this perspective, all forms of citizenship education should promote respects for others and recognition of the quality
of all human beings, and aim at combating all forms
of discrimination (racist, gender-based, religious,
ethic, education etc.) by fostering the spirit of tolerance and peace among human beings.
Human rights orientation also enjoys a wider focus among Nigerian writers especially among the
texts used in secondary schools. Okom (1999) emphasized how citizenship status involves conferment of
rights on some individuals while others who are denied their rights in the society and access to resources
is scarce - such as the peasants, aliens, women and
slaves in Ancient Greek city states. For Nigerian citizens, understanding of his/her rights and duties
should be a vital part of civic education curriculum.
Thus, we when speak of purposes to be ascribed to citizenship education (comprising knowledge of the social and political rights of all human beings and their
recognition), we inevitably end up with the complementarities between citizenship and human rights.
Bearing in mind these complementarities, citizenship
education means not only ‘educating citizens’, but also educating children for adulthood and citizenship,
citizens who are not ignorant of their rights and are
willing to perform their civic obligations. Moreover,
human right includes civil, social and political rights,
the later obviously relating to the rights and obligations of citizens. Thus a comprehensive human rights
education takes citizenship into account, and considers that good citizenship is concerned with human
rights as a whole.
2. The Curriculum Framework and
Citizenship Education
The focus on curriculum development on citizenship
education in Nigeria was comparatively low compared to literacy, arts, science and even technology.
Even though, it was implicitly addressed in the recommendation of 1969 National Curriculum Conference, the objective of good citizenship was lumped
among other objectives in Social Studies Education.
The National Curriculum Conference took place
November in 1969 at the National Assembly, Hall Lagos. As a follow-up to this conference was a National
Seminar took place in 1973, where the recommendations of the 1969 National Conference were discussed
and eventually crystallized into the adoption of a National Policy on Education. The policy was first published in 1977 and subsequent editions were published
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 61–67
in 1981 and 2004. Some of the core recommendation
of 1969 National Conference was the basis of discussion in 1973 seminar. Some of the core recommendations that form the foundation for citizenship
education are recommendations 3 and 7. Recommendation 3 states that “Nigeria education should be geared towards self-realization, better human
relationships; self and national economic efficiency,
effective citizenship, national consciousness, national
unity” and recommendation 7 emphasizes that primary education should serve to help the child towards
self-realization and to relate to others through mutual
understanding, effective citizenship through civil responsibility, social and political awakening
(Adaralegbe 1972). Apart from these recommendations the goals of the Second National Development
Plan which was later adopted as the National goals
gave credence and impetus to incorporation of citizenship education into curriculum. The National goals
are:
a. a free and democratic society
b. a just and egalitarian society
c. a united, strong and self-reliant nation
d. a great and dynamic economy; and
e. a land of bright and full opportunities for all
citizens (NPE,2004).
The two recommendations and the national goals
formed the basis of citizenship education in Nigeria.
When the curriculum was fully developed into a
rational package, Social Studies, taught in Primary
and Junior Secondary Schools, was designed to cater
for aspect of citizenship education (FGN 2007). The
specific objectives of Social Studies include promoting a broader understanding of the physical, economic, social, and cultural environments, develop,
encourage and strengthen pupils’ enquiring minds
and help teachers and pupils discover what is good
and unique in the physical, social, economic and cultural traditions which hitherto have been implied or
neglected
It is noteworthy that the curriculum addresses some fundamental issues regards the learning of citizenship that include operational definitions of
citizenship, mode of acquisition, fundamental rights
and duties of citizens, and national symbols. However, the curriculum content has been observed to lack
depth and the teaching methods were traditional, teacher-centered with little or no practical application in
the school ethos and practices. The mode of evaluation is pen and paper system in which, inmost cases
students respond to questions after memorizing concepts. This negatively impacts the classroom teachings (Marinho 2009) as the commonplace
experience is that after examination, students easily
forget everything they have learnt even if they have
performed averagely or brilliantly well during examinations. This portrays gross deficiency in the system.
63
Oyeleke Oluniyi
The objective is invariably reduced to mere passing
examination without the personal integration of
ideals for active citizenship. Marinho (2009, 7) wrote
further that, “the new curriculum fails to take into account useful pedagogical methods that assist in
achieving goals ... Modes of teaching are outdated …”
The assessment usually fails to measure whether citizens actually practice democratic values in their relationships, attitudes and outlook. How do we asses
whether a child has internalized democratic values? Is
it through pen and paper mode of assessment? Could
the successful internalization of values taught be a
basis for selecting school prefects? Or these values
are set as criteria for nominating eligible prefects and
those who fall into the inclusion criteria go through
election process? Obviously, there is no national or
school based benchmark to ascertain the internalization of democratic values and achievement of citizenship education curriculum goal.
A critical examination of existing textbooks also
shows the shallowness of the content as most are limited to a mere definition of contents. Even at higher
institutions where citizenship education is taught as a
general course, the content is limited to some basic
concepts in political science which are taught in a separate subject (Government) at secondary school level. For the sake of emphasis, topics such as Organs of
Government, concepts such as Democracy, Monarchy,
Socialism, Political Party and Party System: Power and
Authority are predominantly the focus of the curriculum. In addition, Nigeria political experience and social life possesses greater challenges that using the
curriculum might amount to handling the issues of
nation building with kid glove in the light of past frequent military intervention in politics among other
challenges. In 1999, the country returned to civil rule
after prolonged successive military misrule. The nascent democracy is however characterized by all sorts
of semi-democracy or pseudo-democracy traits such
as electoral malpractices, ethno-religious conflicts,
primitive accumulation of wealth at the expense of
the state by the political class and election malpractices. Ijalaye (2009) comment on 2007 general election
shed light on the nature of past elections in Nigeria.
He observed that election rigging through the combined power of incumbency by government and political party in power has always been a regular feature
in the election process in Nigeria. However, there was
beacon of light from the 2011 general election. It was
adjudged by national and international observers as
the most free and fair election ever conducted in Ni-
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 61–67
geria. However, the spate of corruption in Nigeria is
alarming and pervades every aspect of National life
from the technocrats to the politicians. Infrastructures are at low ebbs and citizens’ disposition to taking
care of public facilities is best described as non-challant (Adebayo, 1986; Iroanusi, 2006; Ajibewa, 2006;
Magstadt, 2009).
To sustain and consolidate the democracy, citizens
must be taught and made to internalize the purpose
of democracy. Values such as liberty, service, justice,
religious equality, and tolerance among others must
be inculcated. Negative traits such as religious violence, armed robbery, ritual killings, electoral malpractices, official corruption must be condemned and
isolated from private and national life. Citizens must
come to the realization of the fact that democratic values are not embedded in genetic code. They evolve
over time and each generation can decide their values
and their preferred models of society.
A major innovation towards learning citizenship
and ideals of representative democracy is the introduction of Civics Education into primary and junior
secondary schools in 2007. The existing Social Studies
curriculum has undergone major restructuring. Aspects of citizenship education in the Social Studies
curriculum for junior secondary school were completely disarticulated and a separate subject termed Civics was designed targeted towards amelioration of
the vices stated above and promotion of active citizenship.
In the part of the introductory message by Professor Godswill Obioma – the Executive Secretary of Educational Research and Development Council (the
body in –charge of curriculum Development in Nigeria), he noted that; the curriculum reflects depths, appropriateness, and inter-relations of the curriculum
contents. It was introduced to attain the Millennium
Development Goals by 2015, and by extension, the
need to implement the core focus of the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategies
(NEEDs), which are value orientation, poverty eradication, job creation, wealth generation and using education to empower people.
A critical observation of the curriculum package
shows the will to translate the intentions of the government into an institutional expression in the
school where students would be taught basic values
and ideals that would presumably make them responsible citizens
The themes covered in the curriculum package are
shown in tables below:
64
Oyeleke Oluniyi
Table 1: Primary School Civics Curriculum
Grade
Topics
Primary
One
Primary
Two
Primary
Three
Civic Education, National Symbol, Good Social Behaviour and Health Issues
Civic Education, The school, Community
and Health Issues
Civic Education, National Consciousness,
Duties and Responsibilities and Health Issues
Our Values, Citizenship, National Consciousness, Duties and Responsibilities, Government, Constituted Authority, Social
Issues and Health Issues
Civic Education, Our Values, Citizenship,
National Consciousness, Duties and Responsibilities, Government, Representative
Democracy and Civil Society and Popular
Participation
Civic Education, Values, National Consciousness and Identity, Government and Civil
Society and Popular Participation
Primary
Four
Primary
Five
Primary
Six
Source: Nigerian Educational and Research Development Council, 2007
Table 2: Junior Secondary Civics Curriculum
Grade
Topics
J.S. 1
Citizenship, National Consciousness and
Identity, Representative Democracy, Nigerian Constitution, Human Rights, Rights
and Obligation of Nigerian Citizens and Social Issues
Our Values, Citizenship, Rights and the Rule of Law, Nigerian Constitution and Social
Issues
Human Rights and the Rule of Law, Nigerian Constitution, Representative Democracy, Duties and Responsibilities of Citizens,
Social Issues, National Economic Life and
Peace and Conflicts
J.S. 2
J.S. 3
Source: Nigerian Educational and Research Development Council, 2007
A survey was carried out by the author to determine
the perceived effectiveness of the new initiative on
Civics curriculum in primary and junior secondary
schools. The core focus was to examine the relative effectiveness of the proposed Civics in comparison with
the existing Social Studies curriculum. A random sampling of one hundred and fifty (150) Social Studies
teachers who are also expected to teach the proposed
Civics education subject was made. At least at present, no provision is made towards the training of new
specialists. Eighty percent (80%) of the respondents
agreed that the curriculum content of the new sub-
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 61–67
ject – Civics is more robust on democratic issues than
the existing Social Studies. The probable reason may
be due to the eclectic, integrative nature of Social
Studies, in which the focus on the aspects of learning
active citizenship may be shallow while attempting to
provide curriculum balancing to other thematic
focus. However, fifty five percent (55%) of the teachers argued that there is no need to create a new subject, but rather that Social Studies could have been
strengthened in terms of depth in the curriculum content and improved methodology. The supporting argument is that the school time table is already over
crowded, to the extent that there is no provision for
the new Civics in the School Board Assessment broad
sheet. Twenty five percent (25%) of the respondents
agreed to a separate subject framework in which
Civics is separated from Social Studies, while twenty
percent (20%) maintained a neutral position. It is the
opinion of the author that integration should have
been vigorously pursued. I strongly recommend that
aside making an integral part of Social Studies in primary and secondary schools, teaching and learning
citizenship should cut across separate subject orientations and spread across various school subjects
such as language, health education, physical and biological sciences.
3. Conclusion and Future Directions
The efforts of the government and its agencies responsible for the curriculum innovation are commendable, however some fundamental issues are yet
to be resolved, mainly regarding the articulation between the philosophy of the curriculum and the challenges faced by the Nigerian democracy.
Are students who are predominantly the main target group for the curriculum innovation in the position to avert undemocratic social order? If perhaps
the overriding objective is to secure the future
through education of the younger generation, what
about the overriding influence of the society on the
school community? Experience has shown over time
that, students learn from what goes on in the society,
an influence that seems to be more normative and
stronger than set of values being expounded to them
by teachers in schools. Instance where school children internalized and overtly practice anti-democratic
traits prevailing in their immediate society contrary
to what was taught in the classroom supports this observation (Oyeleke, 2011).
The reform which the innovation seeks to support
is vague to the teachers who are to catalyze the required change and also to the generality of the citizens.
Information management system is a key to success
in planning and if people are part of the change process, adaptation becomes much easier. The level of
consultation to the stakeholders during the process
of designing the curriculum is at zero level when con-
65
Oyeleke Oluniyi
sidering the new initiatives on the Civics curriculum
for the primary and secondary school. One would have expected teachers, relevant professional associations, parents associations, academics and relevant
educational institutes to feature in the development
process. Keeping teachers abreast of the changes is a
key factor to success. Moreover, in some instances, research shows that teachers have assessed themselves
as having inadequate knowledge of civics and citizenship education (Mkpa, 1997; Ugwu, 2005; Eseh,
2005, Oloruntegbe et al, 2010).
Styles of teachings should also become more
open. Efforts should be made to re-training teachers
to embrace styles, approaches and strategies that do
not endanger the curriculum content. One may be
tempted to ask why, in spite of vigorous campaign
for innovation and changes in the school, are the proposed changes not implemented? Why are teachers
still clinging to the usual traditional approach to leadership and methodology in the classroom? Does
their training and orientation support changes and innovation? A teacher trained under authoritarian style
will find it difficult to adopt open, democratic system.
What has never been experienced can never be given.
Finally, does the school ethos and culture reinforce
or hinder democratic practices? The school ethos, belief system, structures and practices may either reinforce of hinder the teaching of democratic values. The
authoritarian styles of principals and teachers in our
schools should be subjected to review by formulating
a scaffolding policy to strengthen the internalization
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 61–67
of democratic values and ideals in civics classes.
School should be “socially just” and avoid anti-democratic ‘norms’ such as religious, ethnic or gender discrimination, authoritarian modes of selecting school
prefects, cultural and ethnicity bias, differences arising from learners’ geographical location and socio-economic background. Democratic ideas should
not be limited to curriculum provisions and pedagogy, but also the real, contextual practice in the school
environment. Authoritarian schools cannot deliver
democratic civic education. School should embrace
student-centered orientations and become democratic institutions.
Curriculum development in Nigeria is a product of
various compelling forces including British Ordinance, Military Decree, research findings, and societal
outcry. Occasionally, some of these forces are borne
out parochial interest. However, the domain of citizenship education is somewhat different. It is unique
in the sense that it is intended to serve collective, national interest. The effort of the federal government is
highly commendable in taking steps toward the teaching and learning of citizenship. Innovation should
be an on-going process in order to keep pace with dynamism of our ever-changing society. Moreover, as
Ehindero (1996) clearly observed, “no curriculum is
fault free’. This calls for constant review. The Civics
curricula should neither be reduced to a mere booklet
without proper implementation nor should be conceived and used as a tool for political manipulations, but
as an agent of positive social transformation.
66
Oyeleke Oluniyi
Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, pp. 61–67
References
Adaralegbe, Adeniyi. 1972. A Philosophy for Nigerian Education. Ibadan
Makinde, M.A. 1979. Integrated Social Studies: a Handbook
of Social studies for Teachers. Oxford.
Adebayo, Augustus. 1986. Power in Politics. Ibadan.
Adeyemi, B.A.; Ogundeji, A.A. 2007. A Text on Foundation
of Social Studies for Tertiary Institution. Osogbo.
Marinho, Simisola. 2009. An Analysis of Curriculum Development and Content Delivery in Nigeria; A research Paper
in Fulfillment of the Requirement for EDU 515 – Designing
Mandated and Discretionary Curricula, Strayer University.
Ajibewa, Aderemi. 2008. Democracy and Corruption in
Nigeria. In: Ojo, Emmanuel, ed. Challenges of Sustainable
Democracy in Nigeria. Ibadan.
Metzieobi, K. A.; Domike G. C.; Osakwe E. O. 1996. Nigerian
Values: What are They? In: Metzieobi, K. A., ed. Teaching
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Agi, S. P. I. 1999. Nation-Building in Nigeria: Problems and
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Dustin, K. William. 1999. Toward Ethic of Citizenship; Creating a Culture of Democracy for the 21st Century
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O.; Eteng Felix, O.; Okom, Mike, eds. Aba.
Eseh, C.E. 2005. Teacher Characteristics and School Curriculum Implementation in Nigeria Secondary Schools: A Theoretical Review. In: Journal of the Nigerian Academy of
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Adesina, former Governor of Oyo State.
International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA). 2000. Democracy in Nigeria; Continuing Dialogue(s) for Nation-Building. Capacity-Building Series 10
Nigerian Educational and Research Development Council.
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Oyeleke, Oluniyi. 2011. The Democratization Process and
Classroom Teachings in Nigeria. In: Journal of Citizenship,
Social and Economic Education, Vol. 10, No. 1, 56–63.
(www.wwwords.co.uk/CSEE).
Ozumba, G. O.; Eteng, Felix O. 1999. Concept of Citizenship
Education. In: Ozunba, G. O.; Eteng, Felix Oteng; Okom,
Mike, eds. Citizenship Education. Aba.
Okom, Mike. 1999. The Rights and Obligation of Citizens
and Government. In: Ozunba, G. O.; Eteng, Felix O.; Okom,
Mike, eds. Citizenship Education. Aba.
Obike, C. N. 1993. Social Studies Education and Contemporary Nigeria Values System: The Role of Social Studies in Reordering Nigeria values. In: Nigeria Journal of Social
Studies Review, Vol. 2, No.1, 25–38.
Ugwu, O.I. 2005. Teachers Motivation: A Challenge for Implementing Agricultural Science Curriculum in Nigeria. In:
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Volume 10, Number 4, 2011, p. 68
© JSSE 2011
ISSN 1618–5293
Masthead
Journal of Social Science Education (JSSE) 4–2011, ISSN 1618–5293
Editors:
Prof. Dr. Reinhold Hedtke, Bielefeld University, Faculty of Sociology
Prof. Ian Davies, PhD, Department of Educational Studies, University of York, UK
Prof. Dr. Andreas Fischer, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences
Prof. Dr. Tilman Grammes, University of Hamburg, Faculty of Education, Psychology and Human Movement
Prof. Isabel Menezes, PhD, University of Porto, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences
Prof. Dr. Birgit Weber, University of Cologne, Faculty of Human Sciences
Editors:
Isabel Menezes, Tatjana Zimenkova
Editorial Assistant:
Anna Zaytseva
Editorial Office:
Bielefeld University
Faculty of Sociology
Postbox 100 131
33501 Bielefeld
Germany
E-Mail: info@jsse.org
Editorial Board:
Prof. Helena Costa Araújo, PhD, Porto, Portugal
Prof. Dr. François Audigier, Genève, Switzerland
Prof. Dr. Cesar Birzea, Bucharest, Romania
Ass. Prof. Dr. Kenan Çayir, Istanbul, Turkey
Prof. Peter Davies, PhD, Stoke-on-Trent, UK
Prof. Dr. Georgi Dimitrov, Sofia, Bulgaria
Prof. Dr. Ipek Gurkaynak, Ankara, Turkey
Prof. Dr. Peter Filzmaier, Krems, Austria
Prof. Dr. Karl Peter Fritzsche, Magdeburg, Germany
Prof. Dr. Gitsa Kontogiannopoulou-Polydorides, Athens, Greece
Dr. Janez Krek, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Prof. Dr. Klaus-Peter Kruber, Kiel, Germany
Prof. Dr. Bruno Losito, Rome, Italy
Dr. Tristan McCowan, London, UK
Prof. Erich Mistrik, PhD, Bratislava, Slovakia
Prof. Dr. Concepción Naval, Pamplona, Spain
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Fritz Oser, Fribourg, Switzerland
Prof. Dr. Dr. Constantinos Papanastasiou, Nicosia, Cyprus
Prof. Dr. Vedrana Spajic-Vrkas, Zagreb, Croatia
Prof. Dr. Anu Toots, Tallinn, Estonia
Prof. Ilo Trajkovski, PhD, Skopje, Rep. Macedonia
Prof. Dr. Nicole Tutiaux-Guillon, Villeneuve d’Ascq Cedex, France
Dr. Ruud Veldhuis, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Ass. Prof. Dr. Irena Zaleskiené, Vilnius, Lithuania
Layout:
Florian Rudt
frudt@rudtpublishing.de
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